Anyone who has been paying attention to marketing and trailers in the past few months knows that Fox is trying something a little different with Logan, their first major tent pole of 2017 that sees Hugh Jackman play the role of Wolverine for the ninth time on film. Trailers have made it out to look a lot more like The Road (or perhaps another road of the Mad Max Fury variety) than X-2: X-Men United, providing a vision of Logan and the now enfeebled Professor X hiding away in a stark, dusty world far removed from the leather outfits and battles with supervillains that defined the series up to this point. Superhero movies have taken on other genres in the past; look no further than Captain America: The First Avenger and its World War 2 newsreel pastiche, or Ant-Man embracing heist movie aesthetics and story beats. But those films, for all of their genre manipulations, were still superhero movies first and these other genres second, still founded on spandex and leather costumes and world-threatening villains. With Logan, director James Mangold (returning after helming the promising but flawed The Wolverine) seeks to truly embrace that concept, taking the superhero out of the superhero movie and seeing what happens when he finds himself out on his own.

Set in the near future of 2029 where mutants have all but disappeared from the world, an older, grizzled Logan (Jackman) spends his days driving a limousine to make ends meet while drinking the pain away and taking full advantage of the available four letter vocabulary afforded him by the film’s R rating. It’s all in service of providing drugs for the ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the last remaining link to his days as a member of the X-Men, hidden away under the watchful eye of albino mutant tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant) in a junkyard on the Mexican side of the border as he teeters on the brink of death and dementia. Dementia is a dangerous affliction for the world’s most powerful telepath, and without the drugs he is prone to dreadfully powerful seizures that put all around him at risk. Logan wants to raise enough money to buy a boat and take them to sea where no one can hurt them and they can’t hurt anyone, but the trip is interrupted by the appearance of Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and the young Laura (Dafne Keen) who soon reveals her own mutant powers eerily similar (identical, even) to those of Logan despite the belief that new mutants could no longer exist. She needs to get to North Dakota to cross the border into Canada in order to escape the shadowy corporation that held her captive, and only Logan and Xavier can get her there.

Logan, the third solo film for the most popular member of the X-Men, also marks the third high profile superhero film to carry an R rating (following in the footsteps of Watchmen and Deadpool), and in its early moments, Mangold sure seems excited about the freedom such a rating allows. The curses fly fast and loose, mostly from Logan (which makes sense), though plenty come from Xavier too (which makes much less sense). And for much of the first act, the film seems like it’s trying a bit too hard to justify the rating by being as hardcore as possible, hearkening back to the early releases of Marvel’s Max line of comics that were vulgar and violent more for the sake of being vulgar and violent than the good of the story they’re telling. Combine that with the pretty extreme levels of violence throughout (this is the first Wolverine film where his claws are unfettered in the potential mayhem they can cause and boy do they really go for it), and it would be easy for Logan to be another case of gritting up the characters to appeal to a more "mature" audience while shooting itself in the proverbial foot by failing to make any of it mean anything. But the arrival of Laura changes everything for the better, solidifying the first act’s stakes and the dangers of this world into something with heft and emotional substance, giving Logan someone to fight for as he fights against his responsibilities and inner turmoil about what Laura represents, using that struggle to propel the narrative forward. Concerns and misgivings about the need for the R rating start to fade, and Mangold and his script (credited to Michael Green, Scott Frank and Mangold) can settle into the family drama and road movie it was meant to be, just with a lot more stabbing and a lot more gore.

This really is an intensely violent picture. So much so that a portion of the audience is likely to turn away, with Logan’s healing powers allowing him to suffer untold abuse to his body and the R rating allowing Mangold to pull no punches in the rending of flesh he must endure (and dish out). Desensitization to the violence is always a problem with a character like Wolverine, both in his ability to take a licking and his penchant for giving it back tenfold, but Mangold is careful in the way he stages his mayhem, focusing on the cost and the consequences of such violence. The R rating actually helps here; we’re far beyond the bloodless, gimped rage of Wolverine’s tear through the mansion in X-2 (which is not to denigrate that excellently mounted scene, just the absurdity and unreality of the lack of blood). We see what he can do in an unvarnished and unflinching way, and how that weighs on him psychologically after decades (centuries, really) of eviscerations. It’s a fine tightrope to walk, as some of the indulgence in violence in LOGAN does cross that line into exploitation territory, but the cool factor of it all is diminished. It’s often played, and rightly so, as horrific.