Logan

Superhero movies like to dazzle with CGI effects, and typically culminate in scenes where cities spectacularly crumble in the final showdown. Not so with Logan, the third, and final Wolverine film, and tenth in the X-Men franchise.

The world has already fallen. America is a wasteland reminiscent of George Miller’s Mad Max and the political parallels to today’s USA are evident – even if they are there by luck. The few mutants that remain have retreated from the world. It's hinted that the glossy exploits of the previous films were little more than aggrandised myths that have been turned into comic books, referred to at one point in Logan as mere "ice-cream for bed wetters".

James Mangold is back at the helm for a second time (following 2013's The Wolverine), offering up a broodier, more visceral take on the character Hugh Jackman first played nearly 20-years ago. Here we’re in a story rooted in the humanity of Logan, not the superpowers of the Wolverine, echoing themes of Cameron’s Terminator 2 and Mendes' Road to Perdition.

Risks have been taken and Mangold has open-heartedly embraced the use of violence, but this is light years away from the tongue-in-cheek gore-fest of Deadpool. Here the violence is earned, and designed to remind you that the Wolverine, a rage-fuelled killer with claws, is reflecting, in his old age, on the consequences of a life of brutality.

We open in the near future on the Mexican-American border. Logan is self-medicating with booze, has lost the mutton chops in favour of a patriarchal beard, and is wearing a suit from Johnny Cash’s wardrobe rather than spandex. It becomes apparent that the adamantium grafted to his bones is slowly killing him, and his powers are dwindling.

Living in hiding, Logan ekes out his days caring for Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who is showing signs of dementia, while at night he drives liquored-up frat-brats in a limo across the border. His only other company is the sun-shy fellow mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant).

The brooding anti-hero's life is disrupted with the arrival of a young Mexican girl, Laura (newcomer Dafne Keen), who bears a few familial traits to Logan, and is one of the first mutants to appear in three decades. Keen offers a compellingly ferocious, near dialogue-less performance, coming across as a combo of the feral kid from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Eleven from Stranger Things. It all shows signs of a promising career.

Laura is being pursued by robotically-enhanced soldiers called Reavers, led by eugenicist Dr Rice (Richard E Grant piling on the English menace), who wants to harness mutant powers for his own gain. This forms the main cut-and-thrust of the plot, turning it into a road movie-cum-western that delivers on the thrills with a cat-and-mouse chase to a promised land across the border.

It's also a slump shouldered and world weary movie, one that creaks and aches, only to burst to life with moments of extreme rage and violence like the final hurrah of a cowboy in a last chance shootout.

Most remarkable of all is that Logan proves to us that a superhero movie can possess humanity. Who knew that a sophisticated meditation on the indignity of old age wrapped in a superhero cape, loaded with father-child motifs, saying goodbye to one generation of heroes and setting up the scene for a new generation, would prove to be the best film in the franchise to date?

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Logan is released by 20th Century Fox