Logan

***/****

By Jason Wiese

If last summer’s Captain America: Civil War taught us one thing, other than “united we stand, divided we fall,” it is that a comic book adaptation can be improved with drastic changes to the source material. The storyline of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s Wolverine: Old Man Logan features the former X-Man navigating a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited with aged characters (and their descendants) whom Twentieth Century Fox does not own the rights to. Considering such matters, when taking inspiration from the arc for the creation of Logan, which sees the final performance of Hugh Jackman as the silver clawed mutant, many changes were needed. As it turns out, they were necessary.

It is 2029 and Wolverine is not the man he used to be. He works as a chauffeur for hire under a new alias. His healing powers are dwindling, which has caused him to age visibly and give him hope that he may succeed in drinking himself to death. He is now one of the last mutants he knows to exist, one of which is the albino mutant tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant) and the other being the Alzheimer’s-stricken Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart, also in his final role as the character). However, when Logan discovers the existence of another mutant, an 11 year-old girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) with abilities that mirror Logan’s (retractable claws and all) and who is on the run from criminals who wish to use her for sinister purposes, he is forced to do the one thing that he has been avoiding to do for years: give a damn.

Director James Mangold, who also helmed the last Jackman solo outing The Wolverine, crafts Logan into a largely dramatic departure, not just from the X-Men franchise, but from the superhero genre as a whole. Taking inspiration from classic westerns, which shows in its introductory El Paso setting, the film follows Logan, Laura and Charles in a cross-country search for salvation. But the element of the film that most refreshingly and aggressively differentiates it from the typical superhero film is its gorgeously brutal bouts of violence and unapologetic profanity. Anyone who ever wanted to see buckets-worth of blood dripping from Logan’s claws or hear Professor Charles Xavier drop an F-bomb will not be disappointed.

What makes Logan a special film, however, is watching Jackman give his best performance as his most famous character. Undoubtedly, knowing that this was to be his curtain call as the Wolverine, he makes no mistake in giving the character the send-off that he and his many fans deserve, especially after phoning it in as the character in 2008’s pathetic prequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Gladly, there is now this film to forgive that and to remember Jackman as the violent, animalistic, yet ultimately human, hero he came to be.

Published to Newstime and The Lincoln County Journal Friday, March 3, 2017