The “Unforgiven” of the comic book / superhero movie genre?

I’ve never seen “Unforgiven”, but I’m aware of Westerns, and I get the concept of 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 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. I think there are some empirically good elements: the cinematography is beautiful, little Lauren is very watchable and appropriately feral, 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 dismisses as not being close to the true version of events, ‘Logan’ 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. I wonder if this movie is the Unforgiven of the comic book / superhero movie genre. I mean, i’ve never seen ‘Unforgiven’, but I’m aware of Westerns, and I get the concept of cowboys getting old.

I enjoyed this 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 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. I think there are some empirically good elements: the cinematography is beautiful, little Lauren is very watchable and appropriately feral, 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 dismisses as not being close to the true version of events, ‘Logan’ 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.