Logan

Logan is arrant nonsense redeemed by the sheer conviction with which the movie is made.  It's the kind of movie that makes you ashamed of your reactions.  Although very little of the movie makes any objective sense, the damned thing is so skillfully directed and its actors perform with such fanatical devotion that the whole enterprise somehow equals something greatly disproportionate to, and exceeding, the sum of its flawed parts.  About a quarter of an hour too long at 137 minutes, the picture is, nonetheless, immensely entertaining and, even, emotionally affecting and there wasn't any part of the film that I didn't enjoy on one level or another.

The story involves human mutants who have extraordinary powers of various sorts.  These mutants are regarded with skeptical revulsion by ordinary people and, so, have formed a kind of alliance among themselves, or league -- these are the X-men.  Some number of films have been made, adapting the characters invented in Marvel comic books for live-action on the screen.  The first X-men picture was made 19 years ago and directed by Bryan Singer -- I recall that it was stylish but uninvolving.  A half-dozen sequels followed and, in the course of these pictures, one of the mutants emerged as particularly appealing to audiences -- this is Wolverine, a monster played by Hugh Jackman.  Wolverine has the ability to sprout stainless steel claws from his knuckles and can also, apparently, survive ghastly wounds by some sort of process of immediate hiscinsence  -- if you shoot him, he can flex his impressive abdominal or trapezius muscles, excreting the bullet, so that the new flesh can then grow to seal off the wound.  This process has left Jackman's torso covered with horrible-looking scars but, apparently, he has always been able to heal from the mutilation and maiming inflicted on him by the half-dozen or so sequels that he has survived.  In Logan, the mutant hero drives a limousine in El Paso, has fallen on hard times, and is drinking himself to death -- cirrhosis of the liver is seemingly an affliction for which he lacks the resources to heal himself.  Like an aging gunfighter who has hung up his six-shooter, the hero doesn't want to get involved when sinister government agents initiate a relentless pursuit of a ten-year old Mexican girl who possesses Wolverine's magical powers (and does him one-better by extruding razor sharp claws from her feet as well.)  Wolverine's mentor, the aging and sickly Patrick Stewart, is hiding at an abandoned smelter where he lives in a fallen and very picturesque metal water-tower.  Stewart is attended by a mutant named Caliban who possesses some sort of super-powers that don't stand him in good stead in this picture.  The poor guy has bulging eyes and sensitive pale skin and spends much of the film being tortured by the government agents -- they pitch him into the sun where his skin blisters and welts in the light.  Of course, Wolverine is, at heart, a good man despite his rough and gruff exterior and, ultimately, he agrees to rescue the little girl from her enemies, an army of Department of Defense bad guys in armored personnel carriers and equipped with fleets of drones.  The little girl believes that others of her kind will rendezvous in North Dakota at a certain location revealed by an X-Man comic book. (This is a weird metafictional device -- the characters are acting on a comic book in which they are characters, but I thought it strangely charming.) The child persuades Wolverine to take her to that place and a frantic cross-country chase ensues.  The movie concludes with a full-scale battle between a hundred government special forces troops and the mutant children led by Wolverine and the feral senorita, Wolverine, Jr.  (It turns out that the little girl is the hero's daughter, although apparently produced by injecting his "genetic material" into the belly of kidnaped Mexican girl sacrificed to produce the little monster-ette or monsterling.  Everything that you can imagine is wrong with the plot.  North Dakota looks like New Mexico and, then, the High Country of the Sierra Nevada.  Hugh Jackman's character is dying of some mysterious ailment, but so slowly that he can accomplish all sorts of acrobatic feats of murder and mayhem before ultimately succumbing to his disease.  There is a magic potion that injected into Wolverine acts like spinach to Popeye -- it gives him short-term super-power.  Wolverine has been cloned and he has to fight himself.  And there is even a magic bullet that has the power to kill mutants who can rejuvenate themselves after being horribly wounded -- but not if shot by the adamantine bullet.  Parts of the movie will be incomprehensible to people who are not familiar with the X-Man saga -- for instance, the hero's name is apparently James Howlett and, so, why is he called "Logan."  (The one name title, Logan is a homage to George Stevens' Shane, a film that the movie shamelessly cites and, even, cannibalizes for some its last lines -- the mutant clone Wolverine that our hero has to battle is a variant on Jack Palance's smiling gunman in the Western.)  The picture is also relentlessly vicious, filled with R-rated gory action -- after a battle in the smelter, the ten-year old girl emerges howling like a wild animal and hurls a severed head at her enemies.  The plot was ancient in 1978 when Brian DePalma made the operatic predecessor to this film, and a hundred other pictures featuring mutants with special powers -- that movie was called The Fury and, also, involved evil CIA and military agents working to cruelly "weaponize" children with mutations that confer on them super powers.  Just about everything in Logan is borrowed from other movies. 

But with all these reservations, I thought Logan was excellent, continuously compelling from beginning to end, ingeniously staged, and acted with stunning intensity -- Jackman and Stewart emote as if they were performing together in King Lear or Hamlet.  The movie has too many close-ups for my taste but they are immensely expressive and the feral girl could not be bettered -- she is strange and terrible and, yet, at the same time, recognizably a little child.  The archetypal plot involving the weak and innocent being defended by the warrior with special powers, fundamentally the story of Shane, works effectively in the movie and the chase structure keeps the action hopping and lunging forward.  At first, I was concerned about the film's quality -- an initial exhibition of Wolverine's lethal powers involve his massacre of a gang of chollos, the Mexican criminals presented in an overtly racist manner, and the killings themselves edited incoherently into a blur of meaningless quarter-second shots.  But this inept opening is not characteristic of later action scenes and some of them are stunning in their choreographed savagery -- there is one sequence, in particular, in the final battle in which the camera tracks Wolverine as he kills one enemy after another, all in a continuous shot:  the imagery has a raw, ferocious power that grips the audience and doesn't relax its hold.  In the end, I can't really account for the power for the film's emotional power except that the people who made this movie seem to have been convinced that they were working on a masterpiece with the result that, although the material is brutal, meretricious, and idiotic, the movie is the best of its genre, a big epic production that is, I would argue, the best superhero movie ever made.