Logan

In the near future, a weary Logan cares for an ailing Professor X in a dilapidated old factory along the Mexican border. But Logan's plan to hide them both from a world that hates and fears them is interrupted by the arrival of a young girl on the run, a mutant who is more like Logan than he would like to admit. When a group of cyborg mercenaries show up looking for the girl, the Wolverine must unsheathe his claws one last time, and protect her and other young mutants from the dark forces that are hunting them.

Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for 24 years, nearly a quarter of a century. There's nothing quite like good job security, right?

Much like how Robert Downey Jr. defined Tony Stark to such a degree that the comic book version now emulates his protrayal, Jackman has similarly defined the character of Wolverine, especially in the eyes of mainstream audiences, as he first debuted in the role at a time where, outside of big names like Batman and Spider-man, the world knew almost nothing about superheroes and comic books.

The fans pretty much revere Hugh Jackman now. He's a comic book movie elder statesman who is still a huge draw at the box office. But 24-plus years ago, a huge part of those same fans hated him when they first heard he had been casted in the part. They hated him for no other reason than the fact that Hugh Jackman is 6’2” tall, and in the comics, Wolverine is 5’3” tall. This is an absolutely asinine thing to focus on, but it's typical fandom to a tee. I blame a big chunk of this particular case on the fact that Wolverine is an egregious little man power fantasy, and if there's one thing that can be said to be true about comic book fans, there is no shortage of Short Kings counted amongst their ranks. But this is also an accurate glimpse into the kind of smooth-brained nonsense that occupies the average genre fan's mind, because if only two things can be said to be true about comic book fans, then the second one is that fans only ever base their preferred casting choices off of two things, and two things only...

Hair and height.

If I had a dollar for every time throughout my nerd life I heard some fan say something like:"That actor can't play that character! That character has red hair, and the actor has blonde hair!" Well... if I had a dollar for every time I heard some shit like that, I wouldn't bother spending any time asking you, my dear readers, to consider a paid subscription.

This is because there are few groups of people more stagnant and unimaginative than your average fan. Y'see, a long time ago, they all stumbled onto something wonderful, some creative and interesting little corner of fiction, a place where their mind's eyes were opened, where everything was fluid, and anything could happen, and they loved it immediately, so they dove in head first and absolutely wallowed in it like a pig in shit. They made it their whole life and their whole personality. It became their everything.

And because of this, they immediately begin to add cement to all that wildly unpredictable fluidity. They did this because they're lonely and sad, and they decided long ago that they're all in on this thing, often times unwittingly realizing, long after it is too late, that they've potentially sacrificed friends, romance, whole futures on whatever their preferred little corner of fandom is, and that now, it's all they have, so as a result, they consider it to be theirs. So, now they want to keep it forever exactly as they remember it at first blush. They want to freeze in amber not only the entire strange and wonderful little world they claim to love, but the child-like wonder they felt on that first day too, because that was the moment that they last felt the most alive. This is true for comic books fans, genre book lovers, movie heads, even record nerds, on and on and on, a slavish devotion to "The Rules" and "How it's always been done" across the width and breadth of pop culture fandoms of all shapes and sizes.

Sad, right? Well, it gets worse.

Because once they've done this, they then spend the rest of their lives viciously standing at the gate to this world, barring entrance, and demanding that nothing within ever change. The worst part is, at the same time, they only ever complain about it. Endlessly complain. Incessantly. The joke is that no one hates Star Wars like Star Wars fans hate Star Wars, and this is true for every franchise. The only thing that those people love to complain about more than the fact that "nothing ever changes" in these worlds, that's there's no stakes, is when a creator actually does change something, or even worse, like with the new Star Wars show The Acolyte, when a creator makes something new and different in the franchise's sandbox.

When that happens? Oh shit... look the fuck out, people. It's a Nerd Riot.

They're sending death threats, and trying to get you fired. They're running you off social media, and swatting your home. They are rage incarnate, and they will do everything they can to disrupt and destroy your life, and all because you dared to imply that Glorp Shitto never skirdarfed a Hofflestuffen, despite vol 1, issue #352, titled This Island Farm, published in 1967, clearly stating that Glorp grew up on Snicklefarz's second moon, skirdarfing Hofflestuffen on his family's Hofflestuffen Biome, and it does not matter to any of them that in vol 3, issue 43, the status quo shattering precursor to the Shitto No More arc, titled EE-II-EE-II... Oohhh? which was published in 1982 after the Cosmic Heirarchy Reorganization Crisis caused a Universal Reset, clearly shows that Glorp's entire childhood was actually a fever dream inserted by Qwato Worms in his brain, when Lord Caffernaffer had taken Glorp hostage on Bizzaillia Bank'furni Prime after the fires of the Woowoo Tataroo Rebellion were extinguished, all in an desperate attempt to obscure the fact that Lord Caffernaffer was in actually Glorp's stepbrother, or was... once...

None of this matters to these people at all. They're rabid zealots. They'll kill you either way, my man. If you don't believe me, just look up how these dumb assholes reacted to the "HydraCap" story sometime.

Or don't. It was really stupid.

Anyway, my point is, now they love the shit out of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Love the shit out of him. You'll see just how much they love him when they turn out in droves this weekend for the new Deadpool movie. But even then, I'm telling you, it wouldn’t be very hard to find some dumb nerd, still red-faced and spitting mad, standing at the counter in some dank local comic shop somewhere, who is apoplectically adament that the next actor who plays Wolverine must be 5’3” or it's an absolute childhood-ruining travesty.

This is the world of genre fandom. To paraphrase Randall, "It'd be a great place if it wasn't for the fucking fans."

But I digress...

Echoing movies like Paper Moon, Unforgiven, Shane, Lone Wolf and Cub, and even a little bit of the Mad Max franchise, while loosely tying the X-franchise together in one of its first R rated films (not counting Deadpool), Logan is the swan song of the Fox Studios X-films.

Which is good, because the Fox X-films are all bad.

A lot of people will try to argue otherwise, mired in their self-made cemented nostalgia, because at one time, X2 was the best superhero movie we had. A proto-version of the way the MCU openly embraces the source material, when X2 was released in 2003, it was simply something that comic book fans had never before seen on the big screen. Before X2, most comic book films featured a single central character, usually with a severely altered orign, possibly wearing their silly outfit, possibly not, and if they were, it was most likely nothing like the source material, and they only put it on at the very end of the film. Worst of all... these films almost never showed another comic book character, except for the main villain, who also usually died at the end. They barely ever even mention the possbility of any other characters. Amongst older fans, the joke is that before the MCU (besides those two late 80s and almost-forgotten Incredible Hulk TV movies where he met Daredevil in one, and Thor in the other--which I loved!), the closest we ever got to a shared universe was when Val Kilmer's version of Batman said the word "Metropolis" in 1995's Batman Forever. But with X2, for the first time it felt like we were seeing the comics up on screen, as it was not only bursting with characters from the comics, but they were all wearing silly outfits, and sure, those outfits were not great, but really, they weren't all that bad, either. Best of all, the movie heavily impled that there was a larger world out there, and it was filled with even more characaters.

For the fans at the time, it was a revelation.

But now, twenty-some years later, it's really the best example of how not to make a superhero movie. It’s basically unwatchable, honestly, except for three scenes--the assault on the White House, the assault on the X-Mansion, and Magneto’s escape from prison. Also, I really loved the brief moment when Magneto and Mystique are being catty mean girls to Rogue.

But other that? The Fox X-franchise is garbage. Except for the Deadpool films, and this one. Maybe First Class too, but that one is only slightly less shaky than X2 at this point. So really, before I had ever even seen Logan--much like when the mess that was the Snyderverse was finally over--good or bad, at the very least, I was glad to see that they were finally sticking a fork in the whole thing, because it was well past being done.

Wolverine

Wolverine officially debuted in The Incredible Hulk, issue #181 in November of 1974, making him the second most important debut in that month and year.

Created by Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and John Romita, Sr., Wolverine was originally intended as a one-and-done foil for a specific story in the Incredible Hulk. I think Hulk was basically just rampaging across Canada? Anyway, he was a character specifically intended to be named Wolverine, a Canadian of small stature and with a wolverine's fierce temper. They named him Logan, after Canada's tallest mountain. He had retractable razor sharp claws, a skeleton that had been coated in Adamantium, the magically indestructible metal that was once what the shield of Captain America was made out of, until it was retconned into a mix of Vibranium, steel alloy and Proto-Adamantium. He also has his mutant "healing factor" which basically means he can take almost no end of punishment, and can heal from pretty much any injury, and just might be immortal because of that.

Barely a year later, Wolverine was made a part of the new version of the X-Men, famously appearing in Giant Sized X-Men #1, where artist Gil Kane supposedly drew the character's mask incorrectly on the cover, but everyone liked it, so they adjusted the interior art to match and kept it that way. And not long after that, the Wolverine was an A-list marquee character, appearing everywhere, on every team, and guest-starring in every comic, sometimes more than even Spider-man. This is something that happens so rarely with comic book characters who were created after the Silver Age boom of the 1960s that you can basically count them all on two hands, and you barely even need the second one.

For many years, he was mostly portrayed as a rough and tumble little man of mystery, a truculent little asshole with short legs, too much body hair, and a hair-trigger temper. He was almost always shown smoking a cigar. But eventually, the myriad glimpses of his backstory began to paint a more complex picture, implying heavily that he was much much older that he appeared, and had a rich history that was deeply intertwined with the shadier aspects of the Marvel Universe. In short, he was a man of deep regrets, an eternal warrior burdened with many sorrows, sad and sensitive on the inside, and an unstoppable killing machine given to berserker rage on the outside. The ladies loved him, despite him being 5'3" and covered in body hair, but to be fair, he probably smells very manly at all times.

But despite how much the ladies loved him, they often broke his little heart too.

In short, Wolverine was a modern day ronin wandering a lonely highway, going down the only road he's ever known, because like a drifter, he was born to walk alone. He's a cowboy, on a steel horse he rides...

Eventually, it was revealed that he had been born as James Howlett almost two hundred years ago. Now known as Logan and The Wolverine, he has also gone by Patch and Weapon X, amongst many other names, and he is well-known for being willing to go up against anyone, Hulk, Thing, Captain America, it doesn't matter, so much so, that they should've called him The Honey Badger, because he doesn't give a fuck. But however Logan is known, there is one thing that always stays the same... “I'm the best at what I do, but what I do isn't very nice.” Now, you might think that this means that he leaves the cap unscrewed on coffee karaffes, or salsa bottles, or maybe sriracha sauces, or really anything like that, but no... my wife is actually the best there is at that.

What Wolverine is the best there is at... is kicking ass.

Now, at this point you're probably wondering...

What the fuck is up with his hair?

Short answer? I don't know. Dave Cockrum, the artist who first drew Wolverine without his mask in 1976, passed away before anyone ever asked him. Now, some people will try to trace a line through Cockrum's earlier work, while others will try to link it to Eddie Munster, or the Jelly Roll haircut episode of Leave it to Beaver, while still others will try to stretch it all the way back to 1935 and the first werewolf film, The Werewolf of London.

But the real answer is... no one knows anything for sure, except for the fact that it's totally ridiculous.

Professor X

Professor X, otherwise known as Charles Xavier, was created by writer Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appeared in September of 1963 in The X-Men #1.

An exceptionally powerful telepath, Professor X can read and control the minds of pretty much anyone, even entire crowds. As a young man, he traveled the world in order to find other mutants like him, which he did, but as a direct result of one such encounter, he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Undaunted, when he returned home again, he founded Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, with the intent to shelter and train young mutants from a world that hates and fears them. A scientific genius, as well as the leading authority in genetics, he built a device called Cerebro, which can enhance his psionic powers to a global scale, allowing him to detect, track, and to contact people with the mutant gene. He then used his school to build the team known as the X-Men. The X-Men were intended to act as protectors of the world, despite its bigotries against mutant, in the hopes that their display of selflessness and sacrifice would eventually help lead to a society where humans and mutants coexist in peace and equality.

It's an idea that has yet to pan out.

Patrick Stewart has been the long time primary fan favorite choice whenever anyone was ever fancasting the role of Professor X, we're talking decades here, well before the movies were ever even a possibility, probably from the very first episode of Star Trek the Next Generation. This was mostly because he was bald and had a posh accent. Luckily, he turned out to be awesome in the role, and has now played the character for over two decades. And while James McAvoy did do a pretty great turn as the character himself, similarly to Hugh Jackman and Robert Downey Jr., Patrick Stewart is pretty much synonymous with the role. So much so, that he has the distinction of actually being the first Fox X-franchise character to appear in the MCU, well before Deadpool and Wolverine, when he showed up in Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

I know what you're asking. Sure, you're saying, thanks for all this info, this great, but... why the fuck is he sitting in what looks like a big banana-shaped wheelchair in some of these pictures?

Because it's high tech and fancy, that's why! That chair was built by the genius mutant inventor Forge using Shi'ar technology, you philistine!

X-23

Created by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost in 2002 for the cartoon X-Men: Evolution, as the clone of Wolverine, who had been created to be the perfect killing machine, but was later revealed to be his biological daughter, like her father, Laura Kinney has a mutant healing factor, as well as enhanced senses, speed, strength, and reflexes, and of course, retractable adamantium-coated claws in her hands and feet. Her comic book debut came in 2004, in the series NYX, a series about mutant street kids in New York City.

An attempt to make a Wolverine for a younger generation, as the show X-Men: Evolution was a reinvention of the X-Men with all of the characters as teenagers, instead of making Laura a person of mystery with no memory of their past, like with Logan, she was instead portrayed as a young girl haunted by the blood on her hands from when she was forced to work as an assassin for a secret project housed at a place known as The Facility. The basic idea of her characater was she would be a sort of Pinocchio type, like a samurai sword that is trying to become a real girl.

While not as well-known overall as Wolverine, Laura has been steadily gaining popularity of the years. Finally, in 2015, while Logan was briefly dead for a time, and was then an old man version of himself from a dystopian alternate universe, Laura adopted the name and costume of The Wolverine. She has kept it ever since, and is now sharing it with Logan, who is young-ish himself once again.

Like Miles Morales being Spider-man, or the Falcon being Captain America, or when Bucky was briefly Captain America, Laura is definitely now Wolverine, but it's a title that both sticks and doesn't stick.

I think, like the others I mentioned, most people generally accept them as the bearer of these titles, but at the same time, they always come with a caveat. It's always "Miles Morales Spider-man" when people are being specific about which Spider-man, where Peter Parker is just Spider-man, or how Bucky was never known as Captain America, fans just called him "BuckyCap" when talking about that era of his life. So now, it's always "Laura Kinney Wolverine" instead of just Wolverine. I think that part of this is obviously just due to fandom being stuck in their stagnant bullshit, but another part is this is the fact that Marvel generally doesn't do the whole legacy hero thing, where one hero hands the mantle down to another, and then the older hero retires, or more often, stays just as active. That's definitely a thing in DC comics, but not in Marvel, at least, not really, and not until recently. This is because DC characters are usually more about the mask than it is the person behind it, while Marvel is more about the person behind the mask, and that's what drives their stories, so legacy characters are not really a mindset that people are used to over there.

But they may have no choice, as there's been a noticeable shift recently, as more and more younger characters have started to appear on the Marvel Comics scene, many of them poised to be potential legacy characters. Most importantly, this is especially true in the MCU, which has taken over the driver's seat as far as these characters and their depictions are concerned. The MCU has been around now for close to two decades, and their original actors are all starting to get a little long in the tooth. The passing of the torch has already happened with Black Widow, and as I menioned here, there's a bunch of potential new heroes waiting in the wings, ready to step forward. But will it work?

That remains to be seen.

I hope so. Fresh blood is always good.

In the meantime, Dafne Keene debuted the role of Laura Kinney in live action in this film, and she really put her stamp on it. And now it seems very possible that she could continue on with the role into the future, especially after her recent turn in The Acolyte, and most especially as Hugh Jackman is now 55 years old.

So, maybe we'll see more of Laura in the MCU.

The Reavers

A group of cyborg soldiers that work as mercenaries, thieves, and assassins, with a particular focus on killing mutants, I've never heard for sure either way when it comes to their original conception, but I'd bet anything that we can thank James Cameron and the Terminator for their existence.

Originally assembled, both in terms of creating the team itself, and in building their cyborg parts, by a man Donald Pierce (created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the characater was apparently modeled on, and also named after, the actor Donald Sutherland, and his character from MASH, Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, for reasons that I can't even begin to think of), the team is usually made up of a interchangeable cast of disposable metal men bad guys. However, the most well-known members include Lady Deathstrike. Pretty Boy, Skullbuster, and then Bonebreaker (who has a tank for legs, which was obviously inspired by one of my favorite childhood movies of all time... Eliminators). There's also usually three guys in Army Green vests who wear bubble helmets, and I have always hated how that looked.

Anyway, in the film, the Reavers don't look as cool as they do in the comics, but I do appreciate how they look like a cross between Private Military Contractors and wannabe-rambo Cops, so you know for sure that they're the bad guys.

Using the Reavers as foils makes sense, as they are good bad guys for a character like Wolverine. It's diffcult to have a hero whose super power is knife hands that can cut through anything, especially when you generally can't show him hacking a bunch of people to bloody bits in comic books that kids might read. Whereas with cyborgs, you cut all sorts of pieces off of them, and they just solder them back on later. This is why the X-men cartoon, as well as in Samurai Jack, they mostly face robot bad guys.

That said, this is not something they're worried about in this film... just fyi.

So, that was a bit of a tangent... let's get back to buisness.

Set in a ugly and decrepit America of 2029, this a world where tigers are extinct, and so are the X-men. In fact, mutantkind, once a flourishing spring, has dwindled down to nothing, turned into a brief and terrifying genetic offshoot of humanity, a footnote in our genetic evolution. This is also a world that is not so different from our own, despite its casually day-after-tomorrow sci-fi setting, with its too bright digital billboards, the genetically modified corn used for high fructose corn syrup, the self-driving semis, the cyborg soldiers, the cloning technology, it might as well be set right outside of our windows, especially when some drunken white teens in their prom limo drive along the border and taunt the immigrants that are being kept in cages, shouting “USA! USA! USA!”

The film begins with an older, half drunk, and ragged-looking Logan being jostled awake. He had parked on the roadside, and then passed out in the back of his limo-for-hire. He wakes up, groggy and stumbling, to find some guys trying to steal the wheels right out from under him. This is The Wolverine we're talking about here, so despite some initial appeals for them to all go their separate ways, he ends up dealing with them in the usual way, but his claws are noticeably slow, his healing factor is even slower. He’s clearly down and out. It's clear that he's sick and old, and he drinks too much, and the fact that he pleads with them not to scratch the limo, as it’s a lease, makes him seem all the more pathetic. He’s still Wolverine, of course, but he’s lumbering and tired. He's clearly lost a step. Still, this also seems to make him more dangerous. The end result of this group of thieves tangling with him is much more gruesome than we’ve seen before. In the end, he quickly drives off into the night, leaving only mangled bodies on the dusty roadside, the bloody and ugly and all too familiar legacy of The Wolverine.

This first scene really sets the film’s dark tone.

Still, no matter how much an old samurai may want to put away his sword, it is never put away for long. Soon enough Logan's past closes in, bringing new people into his life, those who need his help, and those who want to put him down. 

But at this point in his long, long life, all Logan wants is to ride out the end of Professor X’s life, who he is caring for in the abandoned old factory he calls home--along with the put-upon albino mutant Caliban, who keeps the house while Logan works. Then, after Charles passes, and the last of his responsibilities are taken care of, Logan will be free to end his own life. It'll be better this way, he rationalizes, as he knows his own end is coming either way. His healing factor doesn't work like it used to, and now the metal that coats his bones is slowly poisoning him. His body has finally begun to break down after all the long years of constant punishment, so he figures, why not go out on his own terms?

But in the menatime, Professor X is a man with the most powerful mind to ever live, and he is now lost in the fog of dementia, given to fits of anger, and seizures that can make his mutant mind reach out and turn your own to jelly. He is now a vulnerable adult, but one who is exceedingly dangerous during his many moments of confusion. He is so dangerous, in fact, he is most likely the reason why the other x-men are dead. It's implied that it was either due to something that he did himself during a seizure, or maybe even something that he forced Logan to do. Either way, it is not an easy thing to care for his old friend, which is why they are hidden in this isolated old factory, far away from anyone else who Charles might hurt.

But it's not an easy thing to keep hidden when you have no official identity, and no way to make money, except for driving a shot-up limo-for-hire. Staring at his face in the mirror, one thing is clear, Logan knows that their end is coming sooner rather than later, one way or another.

Enter a woman named Gabriella Lopez, a nurse from Mexico who has snuck a young girl named Laura out of the bowels of a pharmaceutical lab. It was a place where Laura and other children were being experimented on, because they’re all mutants, children created in the wombs of teenage runaways, using the stolen dna of other mutants. Gabriella wants Logan to drive them both to Canada, to a mutant haven, a place of safety that was secretly referred to in an old X-men comic book. Logan doubts the place exists, saying of the old comics: “They’re bullshit, y'know. Maybe a quarter of it happened, and not like this.”

But she has money, and Logan needs it. 

Unfortunately, Gabriella is soon dead, killed by the cyborg mercenaries known as the Reavers, men who want to kill Laura, and all the other kids, in an effort to keep the lab's experiments from coming to light.

After that, it’s Logan and Laura and Charles on the road, with the Reavers in hot pursuit. It's a road trip through a world of constant tragedy, a time where the good people are battered and smashed under the hobnailed boot of corporate greed and the military industrial complex, and a disgraced warrior is just trying to do one last good thing before his own time runs out, literally and figuratively fighting against not just his own legacy, but his past itself.

Is it a tad melodramatic? Yes. A tad.

But let me tell you this, watching Laura and Logan together, absolutely fucking up a bunch of swaggering tacti-cool tattooed military dude assholes, guys who all have that undeniable feeling of “militia member” about them, is pretty great.

Hugh Jackman mastered this role long ago, but Dafne Keene very easily keeps up with him, and often surpasses him as the nearly feral young mutant. Here, she is a whirling dervish of a wild child, red of tooth and claw, unfamiliar with the world at large and ready to hungrily devour every experience, and it’s fantastic. Especially as you can clearly sees how much of himself Logan recognizes in Laura, how little of that he wants her to keep, and how helpess he feels at preventing her from following in his own bloody footsteps.

Plus, have you ever seen a twelve year kid somewhat believably (in a sci-fi way) kick a ton of ass? Early on in the film, there's a moment when the Reavers first show up at Logan's hideout, and they send some of their guys to detain Laura, only to then hear a bunch of screams, some gunshots, and a scuffle from inside, followed by silence. Then we see Laura come walking out carrying one of their buddy’s head? Man... (Chef’s kiss).

On top of that, Patrick Stewart, of course, brings an incredible amount of gravitas to what is otherwise a pretty silly character in general, and he portrays Prof. X with a tattered dignity, as a once noble, intelligent, and passionate man who has now found himself to be a prisoner of his own body, as a man who, in his few moments of lucidity, is forced to carry the realizations of the abominable sins he committed, and all while he slowly withers away. The anger and the frustration that courses through him at the unfairness of it all, the absolute lack of fucks he has for niceties now, is absolutely excellent. Loved it.

In a nutshell, the whole film is much more than you would otherwise reasonably expect from a comic book movie, especially one from the Fox X-franchise.

Which is kind of the problem...

Logan suffers from what I would maybe call Battlestar Galactica Syndrome. The second Battlestar Galactica series was one of those things that was generally better than your average sci-fi show, as it was fun and cool, and would often take socially relevant issues and present them from an interesting and surprisingly insightful angle, and all while fighting robots and having massive space battles. This isn't a new thing in the genre world, but it was basically the first time it had happened in full view of mainstream audiences maybe since Twilight Zone, so people treated the show as being much better than it actually was. Eventually, the mainstream pop culture press was blowing so much smoke of Battlestar's ass that they started to get high on their own supply, and generally lost the plot by the end of the series, and like Lost, it all ended in disappointment and infamy. Logan is a movie, so it's not in danger of ruining itself by reading too much of its own good press, but there are definitely nerds out there who now hate this film with the burning passion of a thousand undying suns simply because they feel like other people like it too much, and for the wrong reasons, and they're super tedious about it.

I swear to god... nerds are the fucking worst, man.

Anyway, the worst part is, they're not totally wrong. Because Logan is generally well-done, in ways that these types of films aren't usually well-done, people can have a bit of an over-inflated opinion about it's quality, or even sillier, about how "dark" it is. But that's fine. Welcome to the party, noob, have a seat, enjoy yourself, right? But... the film does kinda think that it's got more to say than it really does, and it does try to reach a bit too far. This is what I'd call a noble failure, but still, this is definitely where the film stumbles.

Take for instance, its attempt to thematically connect to Shane, the 1953 western by George Stevens, starring Alan Ladd, a film that ends with Shane being asked to come back, but (spoiler) he doesn't. Director James Mangold, the unlucky bastard who got to prove that it's time for Indiana Jones to retire, has said that it's one of his favorite movies. Maybe that's why he was a little blind to the fact that this just didn't work. Because, while I can see the parallels between the big speech in Shane, the one shown here in Logan, and with what Logan is about...

“A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can't break the mould. I tried it and it didn’t work for me. There's no living with a killing. There's no going back. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her... everything's all right. There aren't any more guns in the valley”

It's just trying too hard to highlight this connection.

There's also a quote from James Mangold about the movie Shane, where he talks about how "the course of our lives can be profoundly changed by folks who sometimes cannot stay, and the temporary nature of some relationships in our lives does not diminish their power and in fact sometimes enlarges them.” And I get what he's going for here, as well as how both of these films are about the search for redemption when there is none to be had, but still... drawing that connection so obviously and so often?

It doesn't work.

It's too unweidly. It's too belabored. It feels like a square peg pounding away at a round hole. Honestly, I think the film would've better communicated this theme if all the direct Shane references had been completely cut out. I am dumbfounded as to why Mangold would think that putting some much of Shane directly into this film was a good thing to do, that it was needed, especially because, in my opinion, Unforgiven feels like a much better touchstone, but whatever. This is a comic book movie, so its not like sublety is a main concern, and I also saw Mangold's Indiana Jones movie, so who he is as a filmmaker is a known quantity, but still... it's shocking to see how little he understands the idea of subtlety.

But in the end, while some people may sneer at this film and complain, and focus on the elements that don’t work, overall, I find Logan to be an ambitious film that takes a classic formula and tries to do something new with it. I like that. And I like that it takes big swings tpp, even if it misses on a couple of occasions. For the most part, I think the film works. I really enjoyed it. It's my favorite X-film (not counting the Deadpools). That's a low bar, I know, but Logan easily clears it nonetheless.

I'm glad I gave it a rewatch.

Anyway, the reason that I'm rewatching this film now is because Deadpool and Wolverine opens this weekend, and it's gonna make all the money in a way that will make people believe that the superhero bubble has NOT burst, and that people are finally returning to theatres again, despite the ever-present threat of COVID.

Neither of those things will turn out to be true, of course, but at least in the offices of studio execs on this coming Monday, it will sure seem like it.

As for me, I'm looking forward to seeing Deadpool and Wolverine in about a month and half when it streams, because there's no fucking way I'm going to be fool enough to go sit in the COVIDy reek of a bunch irresponsible nitwits, not with the FLiRT variant currently spiking infections, not in an big airless box of a room filled with maskless people all braying like jackasses at the screen, spraying tiny bits of popcorn and pathogen around the room, all of whom have decided that they are willing to risk a permanent disability simply because they can't handle the thought of dealing with the FOMO. No thank you.

But you do you. You always do, right?

Best of luck, fuckers!