Much better than expected

Rating: 9/10 (24 May 2017)

I had read that they pushed this one into the R-rated zone due to the success of Deadpool and the brutality it had. A very good choice, although a very different movie. (The Deadpool short that was before this I found very strange and fell flat. Not very superhero-esque.)
But back to Logan.
What stood out to me was the acting. I personally would put Jackman (lead actor) and Stewart (supporting) up for Oscars. Some very nice work from both, although the material gave them that opportunity. Both parts (especially Jackman's) were significantly physical and required displaying intense pain (and succeeded where DeCaprio's portrayal in The Revenant didn't come close. But to me that was more an overdue Oscar for him vs. an actual valid win.) The little girl was even very effective. The pairing of both her and Jackman was highly-touted but really didn't come into play until very late in the film, when they had the argument in the stolen truck after she takes him to the doctor.
The dark turn in this was refreshing vs. the previous sanitized versions of Wolverine in the past. Gritty and mean. Captured damaged characters well, although didn't give them a backstory about why they were like that.
(The element of the Nurse being killed was odd. The young bad guy thought Logan had killed her, and vice versa. But they never assigned blame.)
The purpose of the journey was lacking, though. Very vague on how the Eden location came to be. It was a bit odd that they introduced the supposed red-herring of it being from a comic book and then it actually being real. (We repeatedly saw the coordinates of the location but they never used them in actually finding it.) And no explanation why "crossing the border" was a cure-all to all their ills. No reason why the bad guys would give up after that and why they would not just chase them into Canada.
Didn't find the direction that significant. The brutality of the action was much needed but then the action became muddled when the baddies kept missing the girl when they shot at her and bullet holes appeared in the limo in the following scene, not at that moment. The scene at the hotel when Xavier had his seizure was vague as it seemed that not all the patrons were frozen. Didn't care either for the car strippers in the initial scene being hispanic. I would have err'd on the side of political correctness and made them white. Wouldn't have made a difference in the end product. The presence of a wall between the US and Mexico was an interesting turn. Probably inserted when Trump's nonsense came up in '16.
But, in the end, I found it very effective, despite its shortcomings.