Logan (2017)

Comic book movies had spent the better part of two decades teaching you to expect a certain shape. The hero suffers, the hero prevails, the world is saved, and the worst that happens is a bittersweet pause before the next installment loads. So it means something that the best film the genre has produced arrives by refusing all of that. Logan is a Western wearing a superhero's coat, a film about decline and inheritance and the cost of a violent life, and it earns the comparison to the elegiac frontier pictures it openly borrows from. This is the rare franchise capstone that understands its hero is not a brand to be protected but a man who has to be allowed, finally, to die.

The year is 2029, mutants have all but vanished, and a broken-down Logan (Hugh Jackman) is scraping by as a limo driver near the Mexican border, his healing factor failing as the adamantium in his skeleton slowly poisons him. He spends his days buying medication to keep an ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) sedated, hiding both of them from a world that has moved on. That fragile arrangement collapses when a young girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) arrives, a mutant engineered from Logan's own genetic material and hunted by the corporate outfit that made her. Stephen Merchant as the tracker Caliban, Boyd Holbrook as the cybernetic enforcer Pierce, and Richard E. Grant as the scientist behind the program also star.

The most obvious thing to praise is also the easiest to get wrong, so to be clear, the R rating is not the point, it is the permission. For years the studio sold you a sanitized version of a character whose entire premise is knives erupting from his fists, and the contortions required to keep that PG-13 always undercut him. Logan finally lets the violence be what it is, and the early sequence of Logan tearing through a gang of hired men is the exact scene fans had been promised since the weapon X flashbacks in the older films. That said, the gore is not the achievement. The achievement is that the brutality is in service of character rather than spectacle, and the film knows the difference. There is a stretch near the opening where it strains slightly to justify the rating, leaning on language a beat too hard, but it settles quickly once it trusts the material.

What elevates the film past being merely the violent Wolverine movie is how completely it understands its own hero. Logan's real antagonist has never been a supervillain. It has always been the animal inside him, the thing he is terrified of becoming, and the film makes that literal in X-24, a younger, feral clone of Logan with none of the humanity he spent a lifetime fighting to hold onto. It would be easy to call this too on the nose, and the symbolism does occasionally announce itself louder than it needs to. But the choice pays off because of who finally stops the creature. Laura, the child who carries his rage, is the one who ends the thing that is pure rage, and Logan's dying instruction to her, that she should not become what she was built to be, lands as the whole movie compressed into a single line. Keen is extraordinary here. The decision to choreograph her fighting to mirror Jackman's, the same low snarl, the same animal lunge, sells the inheritance before a word of dialogue confirms it.

Stewart deserves equal credit for what is plainly a farewell. His Xavier is no longer the serene headmaster but a frightened old man with a degenerative condition that has turned the most powerful brain on Earth into a weapon nobody can switch off, and the film treats his decline with a tenderness the genre rarely affords anyone. The hints at the tragedy in his past, the event that emptied the school, carry more dread than any of the action, and the film is wise enough to let you feel the loss before it explains the cause.

If there is a flaw beyond the occasionally overstated symbolism, it is small. The script sometimes reaches for shock when restraint would serve it better, and a viewer without much franchise history will miss some of the connective tissue, though the film is largely built to stand on its own. These are quibbles against a whole that works almost completely. The ending refuses the easy exit at every turn, most pointedly in the choice to forgo a post-credits scene entirely. A tease of whatever comes next would have cheapened the final image, which is a child turning a wooden cross on a grave into an X, claiming a legacy from a man who died with no friends left to bury him. The film trusts that image to be the last thing you see, and it is right to.

At the end of the day, the conversation about whether this surpasses The Dark Knight misses what makes it singular. Logan is not trying to be the most thrilling superhero film or the most thematically ambitious one. It is trying to be a real movie about mortality that happens to star a man with metal claws, and it succeeds so thoroughly that it reframes what the genre is capable of when a studio gets out of the way and lets a filmmaker make something final. Hopefully the people deciding what comes next understand that the power of this send-off comes precisely from its refusal to leave a door open. If you have followed this character across seventeen years and nine films, you owe it to yourself to see how he goes out. If you have never seen a single one, it works anyway, which may be the highest compliment available to a tenth installment.

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