“Logan”: No Country for Old Mutants

Wolverine has always been the contradiction at the heart of the X-Men. In a team of super-heroic mutants that serves as an ad hoc family for young misfits, the man also known as Logan is the grizzled loner, and also, strangely, one of the franchise’s most popular characters. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Logan—the swan song for Hugh Jackman’s vigorous, often cheeky portrayal of the character—is the best of 20th Century Fox’s eight X-Men features by a significant margin.

Logan is set in 2029, a time when mutants have been hunted to near-extinction by humankind. Other than an exhausted, painkiller-addicted Logan, the only remaining “natural” super-powered individuals seem to be telepath Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and mutant-sniffing albino Caliban (Stephen Merchant). This trio is in hiding near the U.S.-Mexico border when their fate abruptly collides with that of a mutant child, Laura (Dafne Keen), who is on the run from militarized corporate pursuers. Not incidentally, Laura is a mirror image of Logan: a superhumanly resilient mutant converted against her will into a walking death machine.

How Logan fits into the tangled timeline of previous X-Men features is never clarified, but it doesn’t matter. This is a Wolverine story distilled to its primal elements: a fledgling mutant, a relentless army of Bad Guys, and Logan between them. Cinematic echoes abound, including Firestarter and Children of Men, but Logan is still an X-Men tale in its adamantium bones. Director James Mangold—redeeming himself for the forgettable, quasi-racist The Wolverine—pares down the narrative into a pitiless chase, decluttering it of X-mythology and letting the blood fly as never before. (This is the first R-rated X-Men film.) What emerges is an astonishingly moving superhero film for adults about distinctly adult themes, and a superb final chapter for the Wolverine.

Logan opens on Friday, March 3 in wide release.