Genre: Superhero film
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Dafne Keene, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook
Storyline: An aging wolverine at the sunset of his life must complete one last mission
Bottomline: Wolverine bids goodbye to us all with Marvel’s most dark and depressing film yet
Things were never the same with the Hollywood superhero franchise after Christopher Nolan made his indelible mark of realism on Batman. Since then, DC Comics and Marvel have been playing the ‘who’s more dark and disturbing’ game with each other. To hell with tributes to comic storytelling, let’s breathe some real cinema into this thing. And that’s exactly what you should expect when you ask the man who directed Walk The Line to take over Wolverine.
That James Mangold has chosen to call this project Logan is very significant. It is only the fourth superhero movie to not use the character’s name in its title (the rest being The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel ). There are no leather tights or colourful leotards here. “Someone made this all up, it’s not real,” Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) says, clutching copies of X-Men comics, to 11-year-old mutant Laura (Dafne Keen in a pint-sized powerhouse of performance) in the dystopian year of 2024. You can almost cut the irony with his claws.
But how bittersweet it is to see the grumpiest of Charles Xavier’s (Patrick Stewart) students end up taking care of him as he battles Alzheimer’s in his 90s. The rest of them, save for Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who is reduced to doing daily chores, are gone. Logan is the breadwinner of the house, eking out a living by chauffeuring an on-demand limousine. After nearly 130 years of his existence, his healing powers are wearing off — making him look like he’s battling that bear from Revenant every day of his life. Alcohol becomes the painkiller. Lots of it. What’s actually more disturbing is that he needs reading glasses!
Some things in the narrative are sacred, for without them there’s no meaning to the X-Men story: mankind is still trying to control mutants, there’s a mad doctor behind it all (Richard Grant as Dr. Zander Rice), a henchman who does the dirty work (Boyd Holbrook of Narcos fame as mutant hunter Donald Pierce) and a mythical haven of peace for the different ones.
Logan is the most dark and depressing film from the Marvel universe so far. There’s more blood and gore than all of the prequels combined. If anything, it should present an anatomical study of how Adamantium claws cut their way into human flesh and bone, and dismember limbs and heads.
The screenplay oozes with depression and a sense of regret about everything. Even Professor X cannot refrain from using the f-word so freely. The occasional moments of peace and happiness do not last long. “S..t happens to people I care about,” says Logan. When he loses it in a tearful scene involving a departure, taking it out on his truck with a spade, we can sense Jackman grumbling he’s had enough playing this role for 17 long years.
(The article first appeared in The Hindu CinemaPlus.)