Logan

This review may contain spoilers!

Rather than a great send off film for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine character what this film provides is one of the sloppiest X-Men films since the first Wolverine feature. I would give Logan a 6/10.

The film does a really good job of developing a washed out setting that borders upon the post-apocalyptic, where a corporate police state governs society and most mutants have been hunted to extinction or are in hiding. I appreciated the moments where we get the iconic Wolverine barbed wit that we're so used to from the other films, it's especially great when these exchanges happen with Professor X. The special effects for this film are really well developed, the basic claw and healing effects look great and I loved the range of powers shown by the group of mutant children at the end of the feature. The fight sequences are some of the best out of any X-Men universe film, this is the bloody frenzied fighting style that Wolverine fans have been waiting for.

Dafne Keen, who played Laura, is the perfect X-23 to Jackman's perfect Wolverine; her intensity and ability to go from curious mute to wild animal is astounding.

However the best performance came from Hugh Jackman, who played Logan. Jackman has always managed to portray the rage that fuels Logan so well, a wild aggression that comes from a tortured past as a soldier and lab experiment. There's a tired drunken quality about the Logan of this film, losing all his friends and slowly dying from the inside out has stripped him of his warrior's spirit. He's certainly still plenty abrasive and closed off but it's like watching a wolf turn lame. Jackman's dedication to the character really shines through in this feature, I can only hope it's not really his last run on the character and that he can manage a better script to go out on in possible future projects.

The problem with a film like this is that it cannot really exist as a standalone feature when we've had the character of Wolverine appear in two of his own films, not to mention countless other X-Men films already. So it's hardly surprising how bogged down with continuity errors this film is, whether it be from the implausible plot point of Wolverine's adamantium killing him or the entire characterisation of Xavier in this film. The antagonists of Logan are a really weak element with barely fleshed out characters and motives that have been done a thousand times before; the fact the hadn't learnt their lesson from X-Men Origins and decided to make one of the main villains a Wolverine clone speaks to how bad this film is. I've also grown tired of action films that give their tough as nails protagonist a kid that they never knew they had who they inexplicably come to care for; it's an awkward way of creating a feeling legacy and it's seriously simple from a writing perspective. I've seen film like Resident Evil, Underworld and even Die Hard take this route so it's a real shame when something like Logan builds a really lacking father/daughter relationship in it's final act. This film is a long one and you really feel it, normally you'd expect a Wolverine film to have a lot to deliver but this one drags out it's run time without giving you a hell of a lot. The cinematography is often filled with empty meaningless shots, it was very clear to me that the director had no idea how to fill a frame. The score for the Logan was really off tone, it would have been better suited to a crime or noir film rather than a superhero or post-apocalyptic piece.

Patrick Stewart, who played Charles, felt so out of character that he was almost unrecognisable in this film; Stewart's portrayal of Charles as being mentally impaired was flawed and felt strained to say the least. Boyd Holbrook, who played Pierce, was the beefy henchman with little persona to provide; Holbrook barely made a mark on this film no matter how many times he stared fixedly at his robot hand. Stephen Merchant, who played Caliban, was hardly a good pick for the role and they should have stayed with Tomas Lemarquis; frankly Caliban as a character in this film made no sense until they used his mutant ability as a cop out so that the bad guys could keep on Logan's tail. Elizabeth Rodriguez, who played Gabriela, was all passionate pleas and not much depth; her stereotypical performance was forgettable and the fate of her character was predictable from her first scene. Richard E. Grant, who played Dr. Rice, might just be the worst villain out of all the X-Men films; his meager screen presence really does not work for a role that supposedly brought the mutant race to extinction. Eriq La Selle, Elise Neal and Quincy Fouse, who played Will Munson, Kathryn Munson and Nate Munson respectively, felt like a rather corny stereotypical do-gooder family that took up more screen time than was needed; the entire plotline with the Munson's felt like a complete rehash of the elderly couple plotline from the first Wolverine film. Jayson Genao, who played Rictor, was a poor casting choice for the mature young leader of the runaway mutant kids; Genao is very forced in his performance and you feel like he's delivering lines as opposed to playing a character.