Jul 012017
 
three reels

In 2029, when most mutants have been wiped out, an aging, drunken Logan (Hugh Jackman) secretly cares for Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who’s suffering from dementia. Into their unhappy family comes Laura (Dafne Keen), a child obviously related to Wolverine. She is being chased by a team of villains who apparently hadn’t learned from the last time that putting adamantium into people with claws is a bad idea. Logan, against his desires, sets off to take Laura and Charles to a supposed safe zone.

The foundation of superhero films is adventure. Onto that is grafted comedy or action or social commentary, but we always start with adventure. Not Logan. Its foundation is the indie drama: the story of the never ending pressures and pain of modern life. It’s the ache of aging, but more, caring for the aged while you can barely take care of yourself. It is about a person who is neither particularly good, nor particularly smart, trying to survive day to day and not succeeding. It is the father forced to take care of his own father while refusing responsibility for his child.

And I’ve seen a lot of those and my God do they get tiresome. They are the darlings of the film festival circuit and are churned out by young filmmakers with little money and dreams of being artists. I suspect a good deal of the reaction to Logan comes from the average superhero audience member not being familiar with such movies. Well, I’ve never seen a superhero version before either.

Grafted onto that foundation is the second generation western, which is made literal by actually showing Shane on a TV in one scene. If you haven’t seen Shane, I promise you writer/director James Mangold has.

The advantage of this strange combination is that the western elements—aging gunslinger in a changing era, confrontations at the corral, the simply defined antagonists, the over-the-top violence and shootouts—liven up the normally drab and creaking indie bits. It’s easy to take a lecture on being responsible or an examination of dementia in the elderly when fifteen guys get stabbed in the head a few minutes later.

It also gives a superhero film a chance to do what they rarely can as adventure tales, which is actually be dark in the way life can be—instead of the faux-darkness that some play with—and to show the carnage inherent in the character. It’s been silly that for an entire franchise, the guy with daggers sticking out of his hands and whose entire personality is “he’s angry” has barely shed blood. This time, that brand of silliness is gone.

The disadvantage is these types of films are evaluated by different standards by the nature of their structure. The Magnificent Seven can play around with reality as long as the symbols make sense. And Captain America: Winter Soldier can have ridiculous plot elements because the bells and whistles and flashes hide them and allow for the big moments. An indie drama, however, has to make sense and match the real world, although bizarrely it allows for even greater stupidity as it is assumed the characters are making bad decisions. Still, it is much harder to ignore silly tropes and lapses that are part of the superhero genre when we’re dealing with indie drama. Why do the soldiers wait their turn to attack? Why do they get close enough for blades when they’ve got guns? Why do children trained as war machines not fight? (And why are those children “raised without human interaction” all calm and more reasonable than normal children.) And how, exactly, do we get a super secret organization of evil run by a super evil scientist with hundreds of disposable evil soldiers that somehow never makes the news—huh. I guess we can put Logan deciding to hide out at a casino in the bad decision category, but wow, it’s a bad decision.

We’re also stuck with another problem, which brings us back to metaphor. Westerns (and superhero films) are about symbols. The characters represent conditions and situations. They are icons. Indie dramas, however, are about real people. And Wolverine… He’s not much of a real person. He’s an adolescent boy’s fantasy. He’s rage and stabbing because those are “cool.” There really isn’t much else too him. Even amongst superheroes, he’s pretty dull outside of the kicking-ass thing. That’s why he spends most of his time in adventure stories leaning into simple action. He doesn’t have depths to plumb. This isn’t a flaw with the character. Shane (from Shane), Chris from The Magnificent Seven, The Man With No Name from A Fistful of Dollars, John T. Chance from Rio Bravo, and even Marshall Kane from High Noon aren’t complicated, fully human entities either. Sorry geeks, Logan isn’t deep, but then, he isn’t supposed to be. But that makes our indie drama really, really simple. The problems and realizations Logan comes to are juvenile in their simplicity, and would be laughed off the screen if there wasn’t someone’s brains being skewered around the same time. I am blown away that this film exists, that the powers that be let Mangold make an indie drama/western superhero film, but it is clear that the lead was chosen not because he was the best, or tenth best character for this story, but for the financial reason that Wolverine sells tickets.

On the plus side, you can’t say the violence is gratuitous or empty. The combat is savage, as it should be, and always has an emotional center. No meaningless punching here as in five Batman films and—well, let’s face it—most of the superhero genre. Every slash, every gunshot, every scream and death means something. I’ve complained about the fake bleakness of Bats v Supes and Man of Steel. Logan digs into that despair, but it earns it. Paradoxically, it is also more hopeful.

Hugh Jackman does a great job of giving the illusion of depth to Wolverine and this is the only time in an X-Men movie when Patrick Stewart has been allowed to show that he is a true actor. Still, the stand out is young Dafne Keen. She had the hardest job, to create a full, rich character with rarely a word, and mainly though her eyes, and she is amazing. It is Laura I cared about, and that is vital to the film.

Logan has the best plot of any superhero film, but the story is a bit shakier as it deals with icons being people. It is filled with theme but in the end, it doesn’t actually say that much. Aging is hard. Life and family can be painful. You have to live up to your responsibilities. What happiness there may be in life comes from those we love. Yeah, that’s all good stuff, and I guess making it the focus of a superhero film is remarkable, but it isn’t exactly edgy philosophy and I’m not sure the cost is worth it. The price, is that Logan isn’t much fun to watch. That’s fine, but then it needs to say a lot more than it is capable of. People will remember the plot, and it is a good send off for a couple of characters, but I doubt I’ll be watching it again soon, and I know it didn’t say anything I didn’t already know.

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