Logan (2017)

Logan (2017)

IMDB rating 9.5/10  

In the near future, a weary Logan cares for an ailing Professor X in a hide out on the Mexican border. But Logan's attempts to hide from the world and his legacy are up-ended when a young mutant arrives, being pursued by dark forces.

Director: James Mangold

Writers: James Mangold (story by), Scott Frank (screenplay) 

Stars: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen

R | 2h 17min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi 

IMDB link Here

Seventeen years after 'X-Men’ made him a movie star, Hugh Jackman ends his run as the Wolverine — at least for now — with a neo-Western road trip through the heartland.

As its title suggests, Logan strips away the superhero bells and whistles, cast-of-thousands spectacle and labyrinthine twists of the X-Men franchise to focus on its most tormented mutant, aka Wolverine. Seamlessly melding Marvel mythology with Western mythology, James Mangold has crafted an affectingly stripped-down stand-alone feature, one that draws its strength from Hugh Jackman’s nuanced turn as a reluctant, all but dissipated hero. That he rises to the occasion when a child is placed in his care is the stuff of a well-worn narrative template, yet it finds a fair level of urgency in this telling.

For fans who are intimately versed in the franchise’s playbook (and the comic-book source material), this chapter should prove emotionally satisfying. For those who can’t recite the plotlines of all nine of the preceding X-Men films, the new feature’s noirish, end-of-an-era vibe is an involving hook.

There’s poignancy and humor, none of it overstated, when they have to play normal during an encounter with a ranch family (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal and Quincy Fouse). Charles, at his most clear-eyed and openhearted, is the catalyst throughout the sequence, which begins with his telepathic calming of spooked horses after an accident on the highway, a scene as lyrical as it is charged with emotion.

That scene echoes moments throughout the film that dramatize how much easier it can be to take care of others than oneself, and how the one can lead to the other. Though the screenplay — written by Scott Frank, Mangold and Michael Green — doesn’t avoid formula or sentimentality as it proceeds, it makes its themes matter through attention to the intensifying bonds within the central surrogate family.

Director of photography John Mathieson’s camerawork is keenly attuned to the story’s emotional textures, as is the fine score by Marco Beltrami, which incorporates brief churns of horror amid the melodic elegance. Throughout the film, Mathieson gives each frame a comics-based graphic impact, broody rather than cartoonish

Stewart is effortlessly compelling as a man whose attentiveness to the world around him runs deep, even as his own tethers to it are fraying. Keen, in her first big-screen role, makes the mostly silent Laura both kinetic and inwardly coiled, a quick-study observer of a world long denied her. And when called upon to give a vintage movie reference new resonance, she pulls it off with poetic vulnerability.

Even as the film’s energy drains in the later going, much like Logan’s healing powers, and long after the fight scenes have lapsed into overkill, Jackman makes his superhero the real deal. The actor, who reportedly conceived the basic thrust of the story, takes the ever-conflicted Logan/Wolverine to full-blooded depths, and the result is a far more cohesive and gripping film than his previous collaboration with Mangold, 2013’s The Wolverine.

It’s not just the valedictory aspect of the story. And only time will tell if we ever again see a Jackman-portrayed Wolverine. But with his limp, his scraggly beard and his reading glasses, this middle-aged version, caught between his humanity and the engineering that makes him an instrument of destruction, is the hero we need him to be. Ultimately, it’s not just Laura’s predicament that he understands, but his own.

 Read full review at Hollywood reporter

 'Logan' Could Be First Superhero Movie To Get Best Picture Nomination   

Logan is the third-longest running superhero cinematic franchise in history, behind only Superman and Batman, and is the longest running "continuing storyline" superhero franchise of all time. Hugh Jackman has portrayed Wolverine more times on the big screen (Logan being his ninth performance in the role) than any other actor has portrayed any superhero in feature films.

Early tracking suggests a domestic opening of $60 million for Logan, but that number will climb higher as we approach opening weekend, and the higher end in that particular scenario would push it to $180+ million domestic and $530 million worldwide.

Logan is the first superhero movie since The Dark Knight to have a strong chance of being considered among the contenders for Best Picture come Oscar time in early-2018. It could hypothetically also be considered a contender for some other awards, including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, too. We've had many great superhero movies over the years, but it takes a certain type and tone, a certain quality, a certain combination of factors -- including directing, acting, scripting, and so on -- to really be a serious contender. We've only had a very few that ever seemed to have a serious chance, and Logan joins those ranks because it's one of the best of the best.

Logan is the most beautifully rendered film in the X-Men franchise, and the most visually unique of the bunch. Within the genre overall, it stands out in this regard as well, with only a very few films comparing (the Dark Knight trilogy and Watchmen come instantly to mind, ). It's about more than having an identifiable aesthetic, instead speaking to the way the film captures an entire attitude and idea of itself in its visuals, its framing of shot, and how those things are in turn reflections of the story and characters and themes. It's not hard to have a "look," but it's hard for that look to not just mean something but also reinforce and speak to story and meaning. Mangold seems to have born this in mind in every frame, not out of sense of trying to force it to comply but out of artistic vision so absolute he imbues all elements of the work with that vision.

Whatever doubts I had about the need for Logan to provide R-rated chaos and destruction in a Wolverine story, I was completely mistaken. This isn't violence for violence's sake, nor is it a cheap appeal to that segment of audiences who want graphic violence and profanity simply because of their own self-consciousness about whether their fan interests are "grown up" enough. Logan uses violence, profanity, and other unnerving, shocking artistic choices the way a film like Bonnie and Clyde, The Passion of the Christ, The Wild Bunch, or RoboCop for example pushed boundaries as statements and to speak to greater truths about the characters and the world they inhabit, to evoke responses that make the moments of violence resonate within the viewer as expressions of the themes and how we connect to them personally.

This is easily Jackman's greatest performance as Wolverine, allowing him to delve deeper into the persona than any previous film. He not only brings the usual cynicism, anger, and regret, but also a wonderfully confused mix of compassion, exhaustion, and bitterness in his complex relationship with Charles Xavier. Then we see his struggle to deny attachment and caring, when Laura enters the equation. Through their travels in the film, Wolverine encounters other regular people and is forced to let his guard down and remember what it was once like to trust, to love, and to feel part of a family. And inevitably, he is drawn back round to his angst, his rage, his sorrow, and his sense of having no place in this world. He's more vulnerable this time out, not just emotionally carrying so much baggage he's grown too weary to manage anymore, but also in a literal physically sense.

We can relate to him more than ever before, and the film doubles down on this by grounding itself in a much more realistic world and set of events, with no costumes and a careful application of superpowers posited within more relatable contexts. Jackman has been nominated once before for an Academy Award, as lead actor in 2012's Les Misérables, and it's possible (although admittedly unlikely, due to the limited number of spots available and how early Logan is releasing this year) he could earn another with this performance. If this is truly his final performance as he and Fox claim, then it's a grand sendoff.

Keen is superb in a role that has few actual speaking moments, requiring her to emote nonverbally while also maintaining a subdued set of expressions. She is guarded, angry, nearly feral in her emotions and behaviors, and yet Keen displays a wide range of nuance and draws us into her perspective so we can relate to her and perceive her as an innocent child, in direct conflict with the barbaric violence and raging hostility we've witnessed from her. It's not easy to hold your own in a scene with Hugh Jackman, particularly when he's playing Wolverine and particularly when you're a child actor in your first feature film. But Keen manages to pull it off, and steals practically every scene she's in.

The visual effects are all very realistic, rooted in a real-world sensibility and with only a few rare, short examples of "powers" on display to carry things into a more overtly fantastical realm. I don't mean to imply that fantastical things don't belong in superhero films or that having less of them is somehow inherently "better," but rather that in this film the story and its effect are greatly served by relying on less of such things and keeping most of the action and events as relatable as possible. The effects during the graphic violence and gorier sequences are especially effective, and serve the larger ideas about the violence we do to one another and the real implications and longterm effects it has on our psyche.

Operatic and also deeply personal, Logan is one of the true great films of the superhero genre, among the best films of 2017 to date, and a rousing send-off for the old guard while ushering in the future of the X-Men franchise.

 Read full review at Forbes

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

 Hugh Jackman's last turn as Wolverine is the real, shotgun-toting, limb-lopping deal   

Why do so many superhero films sold as ‘for mature audiences’ feel like they’re meant for exactly the opposite? Whatever the reason, this emphatically isn’t the case with Logan, the third – and by a significant margin, best – lone outing for Hugh Jackman’s well-knit and whiskery mutant.

This Logan is less like a superhero than Alan Ladd’s Shane, a noble loner drawn into the orbit of someone else’s fight, which in turn becomes inescapably personal. In fact, the spectre of Shane looms so large in Logan that at one point some of the characters actually sit down to watch it. Professor Charles Xavier, played again by Patrick Stewart, describes it as “almost 100 years old”, which places the action at some point between now and 2053.

Logan’s plot pushes its titular hero out into the (largely rural) America of this near future, with a young girl called Laura (Dafne Keen), the first new mutant to surface in 25 years, under his protection. That premise suggests the sinuous science-fiction of Children of Men, though the film owes far more to early John Carpenter – both in its snaps of shock-and-awe brutality and Mangold’s nerve-stiffening composition and framing.

Crucially, Logan puts Jackman to better use than any other entry in the X-Men franchise, during which he’s often seemed tamped down by the constrictions of an ensemble cast or feeble script (and sometimes both). Though his character is visibly older, facial hair grown out and flecked with grey, Jackman’s charisma and bulk are both strappingly undiminished.

An early set-to with carjackers establishes him as a force to be reckoned with, and also lays out the film’s commitment to its violence, which is detailed, visceral and creatively nasty – the fight scenes are explosions of rage more than displays of martial prowess.

There is something of Mad Max in a terrifically staged desert car chase – in fact, at times the bearded, wild-eyed Jackman looks uncannily like a mid-penance Mel Gibson – and there as elsewhere, the use of computer graphics is subtle, and the action looks dusty and authentic.

Marco Beltrami’s nervy, evocative score, peppered with rumbling synths and jabs of piano, is a perfect match, as are the incidental songs by Johnny Cash, Jim Croce and other gravelly brooders. But the film is as tense and gripping in its quieter moments – of which there are plenty – as its set-piece showdowns.

Eleven-year-old Keen, who’s making her film debut, does impressive work in a tricky, near-wordless (though far from silent) role – while Jackman seizes on the chance to go deeper and bigger with this character than ever before.

How much fans of the series will take to all this isn’t immediately obvious: Logan is a film for people, like me, who thought the only good bit of X-Men: Apocalypse was Michael Fassbender crying in the woods, and left the cinema wishing that had been the whole thing. It’s something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.

Read full review at TheTelegraph

 

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

 Hugh Jackman's Wolverine enters a winter of X-Men discontent  

  Superpowers are one thing, but no-one said they were immortal. What happens when superheroes get old? Actually, what happens when, like many non-superheroes, they arrive at late middle-age without a partner, in ill health, and with an ageing parent to look after? Or parent-figure anyway. You find yourself asking these questions watching this surprisingly engaging, but downbeat – and also violent – X-Men movie from the Marvel stable. It is more like a survivalist thriller than a superhero film, and signals its wintry quality with the title itself. It’s like seeing a film entitled Banner or Parker or Kent. With the approach of death, maybe super identity is cast off. Superpowers start to fade along with ordinary powers.

We’re about a decade into the future, and the American landscape looks grim if not decidedly post-apocalyptic: mutants are illegal, though a sinister corporation has been tasked with controlling any new examples and putting them to work in the service of the state.

Amusingly, these people have made contact with Logan through an X-Men comic book, and the movie finesses the existence of these in the superhero world as rumourmongering pulp fiction. They infuriate Logan, who says that the world’s bad stuff can’t be tackled by an “asshole in a leotard” and says that comic books are “ice cream for bedwetters”. Harsh. As far as other mythologies go, Laura, Xavier and Logan find themselves holed up in a hotel-room watching the old western classic Shane on TV, which Professor Xavier says he remembers watching as a kid at the Essoldo. Did Stewart improvise that line? Or do screenwriters James Mangold, Michael Green and Scott Frank have a connoisseur knowledge of defunct Brit cinema chains?

But the heart of the movie is the unexpectedly poignant relationship between Xavier and Logan: I’d be tempted to call them the Steptoe and Son of the mutant world, although in fact Logan goes into Basil Fawlty mode at one stage with his own pickup truck, attempting to trash it – perhaps to teach it a lesson. Logan is a forthright, muscular movie which preserves the X-Men’s strange, exotic idealism.

Read full review at The Guardian

Wolverine Reaches the Last Chapter in Grim, Overbearing Logan  

Comic-book movies are such big business now that Hollywood has moved on to the next step, the process of proving to audiences that pictures based on hugely beloved comic-book franchises are not just fun—they’re good for you. Hundreds of culture writers have logged millions of words making the case that the mythology of the X-Men—or the Avengers, or Superman or Batman—is important because it’s boldly anti-fascist, or because it empowers those who, in real life, are often marginalized. Those people aren’t wrong—the ideas are definitely there in the material. The problem with hanging so much somber moral draping around comic-book mythology is that it presupposes that these stories are good because they’re good for us. A story’s darkness—or even just its alleged darkness—can be used as a cudgel against anyone who recoils from it: If you don’t respond to, say, stern, ashy images of largely dark-skinned children (read: immigrants) being hunted down in the forest, then you’re just willfully ignorant of the grim side of human nature.

The grim side of human nature is all over James Mangold’s Logan. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a good movie. Logan, set in 2029, has been billed as the third and final installment in Wolverine’s solo saga (following the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2013’s The Wolverine), and Hugh Jackman, as the adamantium-clawed title character, is looking mighty tired

There’s bleak nihilism aplenty in Logan. It’s as if Mangold, in the production’s infant days—he also cowrote the script, with Michael Green and Scott Frank—had looked into a crystal ball and seen a crisp vision of the post-election despair that many Americans would be feeling in the early days of 2017. There’s no doubt that Logan, with its focus on persecuted outsiders, is tapping the national mood of at least half the country right now.

If only tapping were enough. Because no matter what Logan’s intentions are, it’s less an effective political statement than a movie out to punish the audience with its virtue. Shot by John Mathieson in businesslike apocalyptic tones of brownish-gray, Logan is designed, visually, to bring you down, way down. Superspoiler alert: Characters X-Men fans care about will die. But come on—you knew that was coming, didn’t you? In a world this aggressively gritty, it’s never a surprise when anyone kicks the bucket. The issue isn’t that they die, but that their deaths carry surprisingly little weight. Humanity’s lack of humanity is just business as usual. At one point Logan holds up the X-Men comic that Laura has been clinging to as a promise of hope, asserting, in his numbed despair, that it’s all just made-up stuff—it isn’t real. That’s not abrasive, self-aware honesty—it’s more like an advertisement for how abrasively self-aware this picture is.

Mangold works hard to make Logan feel solid and important. George Stevens’ archetypal western Shane, with its classic overtones of nobility and sacrifice, is not only referenced but waved around like a gilt incense holder. Terrible things happen to wonderful people, because this isn’t just a comic-book movie—it’s America.

The violence in Logan is grisly and overbearing, just in case you’d otherwise failed to get the memo on its tone of unforgiving gloom. This picture is explicitly for adults: The MPAA has given it an R rating for violence, brief nudity, and curse words, the usual stuff the MPAA obsesses over. But there’s nothing exhilarating or pulpy about Logan. The picture is mostly tedious and unpleasant, which is a shame for the sake of the performers. Jackman works hard here, and his performance does away with vanity altogether: He looks appropriately thickened and heavy and tired—his face has the contours, and the character, of a battered hat. And Keen, as Laura, is wonderful. There’s a moody thoughtfulness about her, reminiscent of the young Natalie Wood.Yet this isn’t a performers’ movie—it's too hung up on its mission for that. The themes of Logan are ragingly topical, pointing in the direction of things that every decent American should care about right now. But themes aren’t feelings or attributes or actions; they’re almost not even ideas. They’re not the explosions that shake you to the core, like the thunder of unease you feel after you’ve watched a movie like Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, or that picture’s natural predecessor, Ingmar Bergman’s Shame. They’re just things you make movies about. The great political movies of our time are yet to be made, and they will come. Logan, by either luck or prescience or some combination of both, feels political, but it’s really just business as usual in the comic-book-movie game. It sounds the alarm about how dark the world really is, as if we were incapable of reading between the panels on our own.

Read full review at Time