A mutant run for the border
Newest Wolverine sequel a worthy, unconventional addition to X-Men franchise
The national boundaries of Canada and Mexico figure prominently in the dystopian road-trip plot of
Logan, the latest sequel in the X-Men and Wolverine franchises.
There’s an unspoken third border crossing: the one between conventional and unconventional superhero sagas. The film is all the better for choosing the latter route.
It’s the year 2029, and mutants have finally been driven to the brink of extinction, exactly where their many foes past and present want them to be. No mutants have been born for 25 years.
Three defiantly hang on: Hugh Jackman’s clawed and hairy Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine; Patrick Stewart’s telepathic brainiac Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X; and Stephen Merchant’s shade-seeking tracker Caliban. They live together like the grumpiest of old men in a desolate junkyard just south of El Paso and the U.S.-Mexico limit.
None of them are what they once were, in what passed for their glory days, especially Logan and Xavier.
Logan’s beard is grey and so is his mood. Earning chump change as a limo driver and weary in both mind and body, he walks with a limp and leans heavily on the bottle.
He’s not as limber or as powerful as he used to be, although he can still get roused to throat-slashing anger, as we see early on when thugs mistake him for an easy mark.
Xavier, now 90, suffers from random seizures that create powerful shock waves all around him. His psychic tremors can only be subdued with a potent drug administered via hypodermic needle.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but they don’t have the luxury of time to properly brood.
Logan is being pursued by a smirking Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) who wants answers about a mysterious Mexican nurse named Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez).
The bionically assisted Pierce has the strength to do some damage to Logan, even though he tells Wolverine, “I’m a fan, by the way.”
Gabriella is linked to an illegal bioengineering project in Mexico City, shadowy details to come, that seeks to drastically end the mutant shortage by creating an involuntary fresh batch.
One of these lab experiments has escaped: 11-year-old Laura (Dafne Keen, raging talent), a mute dynamo who seeks a mutant refuge named Eden, which legend has it is in Canada just past North Dakota.
She wants Logan to drive her there in his stretch Chrysler limo, the strangest of getaway vehicles, and Xavier suggests Logan pay heed: “She’s very much like you.”
Indeed she is, as her claws come out and warriors old and new fight a common enemy in bloody battle that earns its adults-only rating (18A in Ontario, “R” stateside).
James Mangold ( The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma) directs and co-writes the story as the nouveau western it is, underlining that fact with needless TV clips of the classic oater Shane, with its similar mentor-protege dynamics: “A man has to be what he is, Joey.” Uh-huh.
Mangold’s not above being obvious, but he’s also not content to just go through the motions of making just another X-Men movie like his earlier The Wolverine. He wants this one to matter, by digging deep into the psyche of these damaged souls. So do Jackman and Stewart, who are the proverbial lions in winter.
Mangold certainly knows how to direct action sequences, which in this dusty landscape take on a definite Mad Max insanity, although the dash to the northern border has side trips that occasionally drag. They build character, though. Who’d have guessed that a scenario this bleak would also have a few laughs, with Xavier possessing the keenest wit? When somebody asks him what he does for a living, he replies that he used to run a “kind of a special-needs school.”
That’s an odd way of describing his mutant-training academy. But Logan is kind of a special superhero movie, in a good way, and if Jackman holds to his stated intention to make it his Wolverine swan song, he’s going out not with a whimper but a bang.