At last: a superhero film that’s not just for comic book nerds
Logan
James Mangold Hugh Jackman, Dafne Keen, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E Grant
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.
You might assume James Mangold’s film is meant as a sequel to the two other solo Wolverine pictures, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2013’s The Wolverine. But watching it, you’re struck by the thought that it could be set in a world in which those earlier films were just films – and this paranoid, punishingly violent noir western is the real, shotgun-toting, limblopping deal.
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. Also, extraordinarily, there’s a waft of Samuel Beckett. When we’re reintroduced to Patrick Stewart’s wheelchair-bound Professor Xavier, he’s a ranting invalid living in a toppled water tower, where he’s waited on by Stephen Merchant’s pallid, stooping Caliban.
It’s while working as a limousine driver in the borderlands of Texas that Logan encounters Laura, and also the shadowy agency trying to capture her. The US feels less like the Land of the Free here than a vast open prison, and Logan and Laura’s race northwards to safety has the knife-edge tenor of a jailbreak. There is something of Mad Max in a terrifically staged desert car chase, the use of computer graphics is subtle and the action looks dusty and authentic. Marco Beltrami’s nervy, evocative score is a perfect match, as are the incidental songs by Johnny Cash and others. But the film is as tense and gripping in its quieter moments – of which there are plenty – as its set-piece showdowns. This is a creatively risky superhero movie and it deserves to pay off.