“Logan” review

LOGAN’S DONE

by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Late in “Logan,” the sullen conclusion to the comic book-based “Wolverine” series (until it’s rebooted, of course), the mutant vigilante of title (Hugh Jackman) shares an intimate moment with Laura (Dafne Keen), an 11-year-old runaway wanted by a cabal of sinister scientists. She has nightmares, she tells him, in which people “hurt” her. Grimly, Logan tells her that he too is beset by visions of awfulness, albeit with a crucial difference: In his dreams, he says, “I hurt people.”

Talk about an understatement. “Logan” may not offer what you’d hope for from a big-studio entertainment—seductive imagery, compelling dialogue, and well-wrought humor—but if there’s one thing the movie doesn’t lack, it’s people being hurt by the slashing and slicing of Logan’s metal claws (which were grafted onto his bones by Danny Huston’s well-named villain William Stryker a few films ago). Even young Laura, who has mutant powers similar to Logan’s, makes a beeline for the gory thick of the mayhem, most memorably in a scene where her eyes gleam with bloodlust just before she tosses a freshly severed head to the ground.

That chillingly gross moment showcases the admirable determination of director James Mangold (“Cop Land,” “Walk the Line”) not to flinch in the face of brutality’s inevitable consequences. Yet that’s about the only thing worth admiring in his film, which is joyless, heartless, and bland—a bloody movie without any actual blood in its veins that’s also an infuriatingly facile goodbye to Mr. Jackman’s noble and passionate Logan, whose soul has always pulsed with the kinds of overpowering emotions that “Logan” strains to stir and patently lacks.

Not that the film doesn’t try to humanize itself; on the contrary, it relishes the muck and murk of Logan’s daily routine, which involves laboring as a limo driver and looking after his decrepit mentor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). It’s quite a comedown from the “X-Men” films, in which Logan and Charles nobly defended humanity from illustrious menaces like the purple-caped Magneto. Clearly, Mr. Mangold is determined to sidestep such grandiose flourishes, which is why he has Logan and Charles living in an abandoned Mexican smelting plant, a battered, dirty monstrosity that looks like a homeless shelter compared to Superman’s crystalline Fortress of Solitude.

But if Logan and Charles are finished with tights-necessitating superheroics, what will replace their dream deferred? A possibility is presented by Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez), a mysterious caretaker who offers to give Logan an envelope of cash if he’ll ferry Laura to the Canadian border. At first, Logan refuses—age and cynicism seem to have stripped away the strapping selflessness he displayed in “X-Men.” Yet when a gang of paramilitary thugs led by Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, touting a smirk and a robotic arm) shows up to cart Laura back to the hellish laboratory Gabriela freed her from, Logan shakes off his shroud of selfishness long enough to hustle Laura and Charles into his limo and set a course for a northern mutant safe haven known only as “Eden.”

And so begins a road trip that stretches across a seemingly endless highway, though a glitzy hotel in Oklahoma City, and even to a farm where a kindly family offers to treat Logan and company “to a decent meal.” Some mechanically cutesy dinner table chatter follows, after which Charles hoarsely and happily tells Logan, “This is what life looks life.” He may be right, although the real question is whether Logan, whose healing powers have allowed him to outlive both friends and enemies, has enough gusto left to carry on.

This plight—the plight of the embittered, pessimistic savior whose faith in humanity has grown as dry as dust—has been deployed in superhero films before, most memorably in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” In many ways, it’s a recipe for soul-searching and bitterness, though dragging a hero through the dirt also makes it more exhilarating when he surges toward the sun, as Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne did in the gloriously cathartic scene in “Rises” when he clambered out of an underground penitentiary and into the light of a vast desert above.

Mr. Mangold fails to come up with a moment of similar transcendence for Logan, mainly because he gets hung up on the character’s anger and apathy. Of course, Logan has always been a brooder, but his existential moping grows tiresome in this film, not least of all when he berates Laura for showing him affection by snarling, “Bad shit happens to people I care about!” There’s no arguing that point—the slaughter of innocent bystanders who selflessly aid Logan is arguably a franchise leitmotif. Yet Mr. Mangold’s voracious appetite for “bad shit” (which he also helps sate by plunging us into Charles’ eerie descent into what seems like Alzheimer’s) yields a dutiful air of glumness, rather than the Shakespearean grandeur of Mr. Nolan’s work.

Mr. Mangold also lacks Mr. Nolan’s inventiveness when it comes to staging intricate ballets of violence, although his unwillingness to imbue his melees with moral gravity is far more troubling. At least four people are killed for helping Laura flee, yet Mr. Mangold never clears enough space in the story for us to fully feel the weight of their absence. Without the necessary skills to chart the emotional currents created by grief, he just lets the action rip and bets that we won’t care how casually he treats the carnage that mounts along the way.

A similarly blasé attitude toward violence infected Mr. Mangold’s “The Wolverine” (in which Logan sojourned to Japan), though Mr. Jackman has often tried to complicate Logan’s brutishness by playing him as a machine of a man who was made to kill, yet tries to be more than a human wrecking ball. That, at least, is what Bryan Singer’s “X2” intimated with its entrancing image of Logan staring at a white-furred wolf, perhaps feeling a kinship a savage creature who represented both who he was and everything he was trying not to be.

Mr. Mangold tries to recreate the push-and-pull between Logan the animal and Logan the man by having Laura appeal to the latter. Yet the resolution of Logan and Laura’s relationship through a stream of tears feels forced and unearned because it’s not a true catharsis—it’s a tacked-on addendum designed to take the sting off the film’s clunky climax, which doesn’t even deliver a gruntingly good showdown between Logan and Pierce. Instead, Mr. Mangold dishes up a dull punch-fest starring a buff, less-hairy Logan clone whose presence evokes memories of hokey opposite numbers from sequel duds like “Star Trek Nemesis” (this from a director who told The New York Times that he set out to make a “humanist” and “naturalistic” movie).

Still, even that pumped-up stupidity can’t obscure Logan’s past cinematic glories. He is, after all, the man who journeyed to the top of the Statue of Liberty, where he was willing to end his life to save a young girl; the man who once carried a barefoot boy through Canadian snow; and the man who once used his claws not to kill, but to free brutalized and captured children, shredding the locks of their jail cells while a raging Harry Gregson-Williams score backed him up.

Logan is, in other words, a better man than Mr. Mangold lets on. It’s going to take about more than a lousy movie to outshine the fierce light of his decency.