3) Logan – 2017
‘Logan‘ is a wistfully sobering, white-knuckle finalization to Hugh Jackman’s 17-year role as the feral soldier-of-fortune James Howlett which will undoubtedly become his signature role. In a breaking-the- 4th-wall approach with Stan Lee’s comic-book catalog, Wolverine critiques the printed word of his X-Men escapades and James Mangold presents a less deified, more graphic version of those adamantium yarns.
If the wanton, overrated ‘Deadpool’ can be genuflected for anything, it debouched the flood gates for Fox studios to be daringly audacious with this film’s R-rating. For instance, the opening car jacking scene is Wolverine (Jackman) in unleashed, splattery berserker mode with slashings to craniums, lower jawlines, forearms and legs galore. It’s a veritable abbatoir with Wolverine’s claws as the meat grinder. Certainly, not the bloodless gashes from the Bryan Singer era.
With acrobatic wirework, a Spanish language barrier and hoydenish, fish-out-of-water mannerisms, Dafne Keen’s X-23 is never a precociously domesticated ragamuffin that Wolverine is saddled with. The key to her character’s resonance is her naive belief that only “killing bad people” will indemnify her of the banshee guilt.
The most bravura example of the ultraviolence is Wolverine’s massacre of Transigen’s security detail during one of Professor Charles Xavier’s (Patrick Stewart) deleterious seizures because it is more cold-blooded and less rousing variety than most vigilante revenge insofar as the opponents are defenseless in their slow-motion rigor mortis as Logan claws through a Vegas hotel room.
With a wizened, salt-and-pepper beard, bloodshot eyes and a hobbling limp, Jackman’s swan song outing as Wolverine is an essay on the heroicomic inevitability of physical degeneration (by 2029, his healing powers are less accelerated). It is further bulwarked by the occidental-western tone with composer Marco Beltrami stippling his score with an Ennio Morricone harmonica.
Moreso than ‘The Dark Knight Rises‘, the character-driven film is decidedly mature in the “impermanence of life” theme and the spontaneous death of a senile, Alzheimer’s-ridden Professor X by the X-24 clone (also Jackman) is a tragic instance of this. By cantilevering the cross at Logan’s grave to an “X”, this stunning road movie is also a fatalistic epilogue to the X-Men franchise.
Interjections 