Logan (2017)

In honor of the late Stan Lee, I decided to watch the most popular Marvel movie I hadn't yet. Unfortunately, it's probably the bleakest, which makes it less than ideal for the occasion, not least because Lee doesn't get a cameo. Still, it's important to recognize multiple sides to his legacy.

In not-so-distant 2029, most people think superpowered mutants extinct, presumably thanks to a government effort. James "Logan" Howlett, a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, finally looking his real age again), has been laying low as a limo driver, his rapid healing in decline thanks to adamantium poisoning. The only other mutants he knows to be alive aren't faring much better: Professor X (Patrick Stewart), in his 90s, is prone to telepathic seizures; and Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who has even sharper senses than Wolverine, needs to cover his skin completely before entering sunlight. Then comes Laura (Dafne Keen), the first preteen mutant they've met in a long time. The Professor insists that they help her reach a safe haven before the Reavers under Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) get her.

When I read the summary, I promptly thought of it as Children of X-Men. One key difference, of course, is that it's not so terrible a future for non-mutants. Another is that Laura isn't a natural fluke: A program has been creating new mutants from old DNA, intended as living weapons, so the Reavers want her alive. And her powers pretty well give away whose DNA she has.

Laura is a bit hard to get along with, being unruly and mostly silent. To be fair, if the only rules I'd known were from an evil military facility that viewed me as an "it," I'd act up too. She also has Spanish as a first language, so it's hard to gauge how much dialog she understands. (A good chunk of the story takes place in Mexico. Unlike in X-Men: First Class, there are no subtitles. But Wolverine gets the gist with basically no Spanish in his vocabulary.)

With X-Men: Days of Future Past, it struck me that Wolverine had become almost too nice a guy to stay in character. That's not a problem here, where he can barely be talked into doing anything for Laura, even when offered substantial cash. (I'll grant that helping people hasn't worked out well for him by this time.) He's not swayed by what they have in common; if anything, that makes him want less to do with her. Interestingly, Laura carries X-Men comics, which Wolverine decries as inaccurate and sanitized.

As for the other major characters, the Professor initially acts senile but seems more lucid in the presence of Laura, who likes him in turn. Caliban does not live up to the wildness of his namesake at all; he might be the most intelligent and genteel. Pierce has a strangely casual air for a villain, calling himself a fan of Wolverine. That may have something to do with his creation of X-24 (Jackman looking younger), who doesn't do much besides berserker rages.

For an X-Men fan like me, it's hard to accept a world in which most of the pre-established heroes (and even the likable villains) are dead and the rest soon will be. Thanks to Deadpool 2, I already had a good idea of what unpleasantness would befall Wolverine. Only later did I understand that Logan takes place in a continuity separate from at least some other X-Men movies. That makes it a little more palatable, but it still reminds me why I didn't read the comics back in the '90s.

The grittiness doesn't end with those premises either. Perhaps emboldened by Deadpool, the series has had a major uptick in swearing and gore, including at Laura's hands. Young, innocent, and/or harmless people die. There is no comic relief whatsoever. I could appreciate that director James Mangold (The Wolverine), in contrast to Bryan Singer and especially Matthew Vaughn, doesn't use innuendo or play up the sexiness of women -- except that the only halfway-important grown women in this movie die.

I should mention that Wolverine was never my favorite X-Man. I guess his antiheroism, long and mysterious background, and multiplicity of powers give him extra potential as a protagonist, but Marvel has notoriously overhyped him compared with others. The X-Men work best as a team, and his tendency to be off doing his own thing gets dull.

If there's one thing I like better in Logan than in predecessors, it's Jackman's acting. Either he's gotten better at conveying feelings beyond bitterness, or he has more opportunity to show off now that the character faces a most desperate situation.

My dad and I had tentatively planned to see Logan in a theater but never got around to it. For Dad's sake, perhaps it's just as well. But I'm not sorry I watched it eventually.