“Logan” steps out of the digital superhero fantasy world and into a more realistic, one leaving a trail of sometimes headless bodies behind.
“Logan” is the new and “final” entry in Marvel’s X-Men Wolverine series, and is either the end of a franchise or the birth of one.
It’s 2029 and mutants have been put down or like Professor X are hiding. X has a dementia that results in earthquake type effects that Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, controls with medication. The grey and infirm Logan is not in great shape either.
In his lucid moments X, played by Patrick Stewart psychically communicates with a young girl, cloned in a lab from Wolverine’s DNA, who is being pursued by a scientist and a bounty hunter with a mechanical hand.
Logan becomes the girl’s reluctant guardian on a road trip to a safe haven that may or may not exist, Professor X in tow. Along the way villains are filleted and several decapitated – what else from characters with steel claws? – in action scenes, and plenty of ‘em, that recall the dystopian future of “Mad Max.”
At one point the girl, mute early in the film and speaking Spanish later, comes out of a battle with a head under her arm. Fan boys are going nuts for a film whose brutal realism is outside the Marvel mainstream.
By setting Logan in the new anti-heroic tradition of “Batman v, Superman,” “Deadpool,” Suicide Squad,” co-writer and director James Mangold gives life into a franchise that has reached the end of its days.
*** Three stars
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