Of broken men and broken dreams

Rating: 9/10 (14 April 2017)

After watching the first X-Men film 17 years ago, I left the cinema thinking that this was going to be the greatest movie franchise of all time. Bryan Singer created a movie that wonderfully weaved reality with fiction, and managed to successfully imbue the gravity and threat of mutants to humanity. In the scene when Cyclops and Storm made their first appearance in the film, you can genuinely feel their extraordinary power. When Senator Kelly spoke about mutants who can enter the minds of humans, you could feel the menace of Charles Xavier when the camera slowly panned to the back of his head.
Alas, in the decade and a half since, the X-Men franchise never reached its promised heights. Characters like Cyclops, Rogue and Storm were butchered and trivialized, while Mystique (yes, Mystique) became the focal point of the X-Men film universe. The franchise's continuity and development also suffered tremendously with weak plots built on weak characters, time travel (!), and again, Mystique. I became jaded with the franchise, and I didn't even feel tempted to watch Logan in the cinema upon its release. Huge mistake, because, as it turned out, James Mangold and Scott Frank blew it out of the park, and Logan is the finest X-Men film since the original.
Logan is a stunning piece of storytelling. It is a story of broken men. It is the story of shattered innocence and the dreams of the young. It is the story of a father and a daughter. It is a story of a father and a son. It is the story of the last two X-Men with nothing left to live for aside from their convictions.