The superhero movie Logan doesn’t look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It’s set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It’s dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping X-Men movies featuring Hugh Jackman’s Logan (also known as Wolverine). No major city is destroyed or threatened here; the only urban scene is set at a casino in Oklahoma City. The planet is never in jeopardy, and the movie’s climax doesn’t involve the world’s salvation.
Logan is old, tired, and slowly being poisoned from the inside by the indestructible metal that was inserted decades earlier into his once-indestructible body. Even more striking, his onetime mentor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is now an unshaven, intermittently senile nonagenarian whom Logan has hidden away in an abandoned smelting furnace in Mexico as Xavier rages against both Logan and the dying of the light.
They don’t gleam the way they did in the previous X-Men movies. Jackman isn’t backlit to make him look like an avenging angel, and Stewart isn’t wearing a beautifully tailored suit and rolling around in a brushed aluminum wheelchair. Xavier looks like Walter Brennan and acts like Lear on the heath, while Logan drains bottles of bourbon and looks as if he’d rather be anywhere than here. Logan’s life has shrunk to the sole duty of protecting Xavier for reasons we do not know until a heartbreaking scene two-thirds of the way through. Xavier feels ill-used and ill-treated and tells Logan that he is a great disappointment.
What’s going on here? I’ll tell you what’s going on: James Mangold, who cowrote and directed Logan, had a genuinely inspired idea—to show us what life would be like for superheroes at the end of their time, when they are no longer impregnable, and when the forces of nature have caught up with them as they must with us all. And yet despite it all, they are still there, Wolverine and Dr. X, and though they may not have the strength that in old days moved earth and heaven, that which they are, they are.
Rather than borrowing from other superhero epics, Mangold and his cowriters Scott Frank and Michael Green take their cues from more unusual fare. Jonathan V. Last has referred to Logan as “Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old X-Men.” I’ll see that clever bit of rebranding, and raise with Children of X-Men, due to the clear influence of Alfonso Cuarón’s amazing 2006 dystopian film (itself a gloss on P. D. James’s 1992 novel).
The world of Children of Men is one in which no child has been born for 20 years. In Logan, no mutants of the Logan/Xavier sort have been seen on earth in a quarter-century. Logan is set in 2029, Children of Men in 2027, and in both films, social and scientific progress has come to a halt. The only signs of change are some some scary driverless oil trucks and giant harvesting robots at an industrial farm. Just as Clive Owen’s character in Children of Men is tasked with protecting the first pregnant woman in a generation, Logan and Xavier are tasked with protecting a feral 12-year-old girl who is (we think) the first mutant in a generation.
When the superpowers of these characters manifest themselves, they do so in situations not entirely divorced from real life. And there is a savagery on display here that is unique to Logan. It follows last year’s Deadpool as an R-rated film saturated with violence, but Deadpool played it all for laughs. In Logan you get to see just how Wolverine uses his claws to kill, and it’s shocking in a manner more akin to Martin Scorsese showing us the brutality of gangster behavior in Goodfellas or Clint Eastwood doing the same in Unforgiven.
Patrick Stewart gives a valedictory performance in this movie that might earn him an Oscar if people are reminded of it 10 months from now. And Hugh Jackman sinks deeply into this part he’s played nine times before and finds new things to do every minute. He’s extraordinary, and Logan is just one hell of a good picture. ¨
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
