Logan

Directed By: James MangoldWritten By: Scott Frank, James Mangold and Michael Green Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant

There is a moment in Logan in which the title character informs a young girl that whatever she may have heard about him from the comic books is total “bullshit.” He says this to her as she watches George Steven’s 1950s’ classic Shane sitting alongside Charles Xavier, the old man making his affection for Stevens’ film clear. The message too is clear, with Logan, director James Mangold is ushering in a new aesthetic for the X-Men saga; out with the comic books and in with the Western. Mangold is no stranger to Westerns, having helmed 3:10 to Yuma in 2007; his latest operates very much under the ghost of the genre’s great entries.

Logan is set in the near-future, a bordering dystopic future which has seen mutants all but eradicated. The eponymous character (Hugh Jackman), has retreated from his old life; he’s haggard now, he limps, is perpetually hunched, his face is scarred, his hair has greyed, a sickly scent of whiskey oozes through his pores. Even his retractable claws are ailing, Logan having to pry them out to full length by hand. He works as a chauffeur and has buried himself somewhere deep in Mexico’s desert where he watches over a deteriorating Charles (Patrick Stewart), at one time a beacon of paternity, but now a man who has grown volatile in his depletion; the most dangerous mind in the world is breaking down, the episodes of which cause the world as a whole to slip into paralysis.

Despite being set a decade in the future, Logan is an old-fashioned story, one which borrows significantly from Western templates. The titular character slips neatly into the mould of Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny and a host of cinematic frontiersmen; the weary outlaw reluctantly roped once more into drawing his guns, succumbing to the violence that has been a cancer in his life for so long; “there’s no living with a killing” Shane said 64 years ago, it’s a line recited in Logan.

This is a film of substantial violence, a significant departure from the X-Men norm, but it’s not subversion for subversion’s sake. Rather, for as thrilling and absorbing as it is, the nature of the violence speaks to the anguish which inhabits Logan. Mangold’s action sequences are as revealing as they are nasty; caked in blood and infected with the sting of real-world pain; Logan’s violence incurs suffering, and so it should for a film centred on a man whose life is so steeped in the feeling.

The cancerous, outlaw lifestyle beckons Logan once again when he is enlisted to protect a young girl named Laura, a near feral child bearing a great many affinities to Logan himself. She has been genetically crafted in his mould, primed to be a dispensable killing machine, a fate she not so readily consigns herself to. The X-Men concept has long had its feet in pertinent sociology, the outcast mutants offering a stand-in for any number of marginalised groups, however that reoccurring subtext seems more pointed now than ever. Under the guide of the faltering Charles, Logan reluctantly determines to guide Laura into Canada where she will be liberated, free from the genetic engineers and co

rporate mercenaries looking to exploit her.

Undoubtedly, it is in rendering Logan’s world of violence, in instilling the character’s existence with such pain, that Mangold is it at his strongest, parlaying exhilarating violence into empathy. Less secure is the director’s handle on pathos. The film, whilst certainly never resorting to sentimentality or exploitation, plays for big emotion in its final act, drawing on the relationship between Logan and Laura (Laura is played by newcomer Dafne Keen with an impressive, steely ferocity) to stumbling results. Mangold doesn’t quite earn his payoffs. Indeed, it is Logan’s relationship with Charles that proves to be the truly touching of the two. Jackman and Stewart have wonderful chemistry together, a veiled undercurrent of unconditional love charging through their confrontations; how often does a film feature a superhero assisting a decrepit old man go to the toilet? Their relationship is communicated with great humanism.

This is to be Jackman’s last foray into the X-Men universe, retiring, after 17 years, his incarnation of the Wolverine character. He does so with a terrific performance, one that, for all of its fierceness, is decidedly nuanced in its subtle evocations of agony. It had to be this brand of film, a tough-as-nails, Western inflected, intimate portrait of a beaten man, to get to the larger truths of the Logan character. The X-Men films have been reliably fun, but there is a pressing melancholia to the Logan character that has never been accessed to its fullest. Mangold and Jackman have found a way to access it here, narrowing their scope to enlarge their affect, a fitting payoff for Jackman, a man who has been such a loyal servant to the series.

Rating:

3/4