The rare comic book movie that gives us an ending – and a beautiful one at that.
I’ve never seen Unforgiven (or Shane, for that matter, as the characters in this movie watch), but I’ve absorbed by osmosis the concept of that sub-genre of Westerns about cowboys getting old. I enjoyed Logan because I followed Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine and Patrick Stewart‘s Xavier over the years, and as I’ve outgrown those films it’s nice to see a new movie which shows how their characters have outgrown those versions too. And since this film is carried by their performances, which I really enjoy, I wonder how it might come across to someone watching this on its own.
Director James Mangold‘s storytelling is slow-paced and contemplative, the cinematography is beautiful, Lauren (Dafne Keen) is so watchable, feral, and tender, and the film is properly bleak and brutally violent in ways that this kind of story demands. In keeping with the X-Men films’ disregard for their own timeline, Logan also does something I interpreted as a cheeky move: being set in a world where there are X-Men comics, which Logan (the character) dismisses as not being close to the true version of events, Logan (the film) by extension allows us to view the movies that came before – to which the intervening years have not been kind – as also being silly exaggerations of the kind of world we see presented here.
Further Viewing
Dafne Keen’s Audition Tape (via 20th Century Fox):
But really, why leave a perfect ending alone when there’s more cash to be grabbed?