He may be Wolverine, but Logan is a perfectly imperfect superhero.
The third installment of the Wolverine franchise is set in the year 2029, where a struggling and weary Logan (Hugh Jackman) takes care of the terminally ill Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) in an isolated facility along the Mexican border. While Logan’s Wolverine can still bust out his claws and take care of bad guys if he needs to like nobody’s business, it is clear that his powers are not what they once were. His regenerative healing abilities have lessened significantly due to the adamantium that makes him indestructible interacting with his old age, so he turns to alcohol to dull the physical pain he feels from his injuries.
He spends his days as a limousine driver to make some extra cash to pay for Charles’ medicine. The professor needs to take the medicine in order to reduce the amount of seizures he has as he loses control of his telepathic abilities.
Logan’s life takes an interesting turn when a young woman named Gabriela Lopez (Elizabeth Rodriguez) shows up begging for his help to take her and her daughter Laura (Dafne Keen) to a place called Eden, a safe haven that is mentioned in an X-Men comic book. He refuses to help at first, but quickly comes to discover that her little girl, Laura, is more like him than he initially thought. Charles urges him to take her to safety, and together they run from those who want to capture her for her abilities.
The movie does a great job of combining emotion and action. Logan’s struggles with his illness are as essential to his character development as when he whips out his badass Wolverine claws. Jackman’s performance as Wolverine, however, does range from moody and brooding to stilted anger, with not much depth in between until the end. His dynamic with Stewart is wonderful though, and their banter induced plenty of laughs from the audience.
But the real star of the movie was Keen, who acted with a depth well beyond her 12 years. She doesn’t speak for the majority of the movie, yet still brings a fierceness to her character that shows that having mutant abilities is anything but child’s play.
Logan also has an “R” rating for the use of strong language and gore, which I personally thought it could do without. Giving that rating to a superhero movie like Deadpool, which relied on those elements to create a witty script, made sense, but for Logan it seemed like F-bombs were dropped for the sake of dropping F-bombs. The violence was also gratuitous. It was Game of Thrones-level shit, but it didn’t necessarily detract from the movie’s plot.
All in all, Logan has a little bit of everything, from character development to action to even a couple of heart-wrenching moments. It’s worth watching for those who want to see Jackman take his claws out once again.
