A Terrific Finale

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2017)

Being a movie pessimist has its perks. Logan is the most pleasant surprise I've had with a movie in a very long time. Everybody and their mother has been grinding their teeth in anticipation for this movie. The expectations were absurd. Me? I saw absolutely no reason to be excited for this movie. Not even the "R" rating could get me excited, no matter how many times I heard someone claim that the "R" rating was what they needed to tell a Wolverine story that is "true to the character". All I knew were two things. Thing 1: We all know how the previous two solo Wolverine movies went. Thing 2: This was from the director of The Wolverine which was, in my opinion, painfully boring and dull. So I walked into the theater ready to tell all my friends how bad it was and not to get their hopes up.
Logan is absolutely beautiful. As bleak and emotionally draining as it is, it's beautiful. It's the first superhero movie in a very long time that treats itself as a movie as well as a superhero movie. It's a drama and a character study of Logan. A man who's spent his entire life pushing people away and watching as all the people he ever loved or cared about die one by one. From the beginning, Logan is a very sober experience. Along with the knowledge that almost all the other mutants are dead (including all of the X-Men apart from Logan and Charles Xavier), it's also weirdly sad to see how Logan and Charles have aged. Logan's hair is all gray, Charles is senile. Maybe it's only because of the fact that there are eight other X-Men movies behind it, but another thing this movie seems to have down very well is a world that feels very alive and lived in. Like things have happened. And on top of all of this grim but wonderful detail, Logan even goes to the effort to have a good plot. It would have been so easy to have some throwaway mustache-twiddling villain who's out to end all mutants and blah blah blah and Logan has to stop him (yes, I know it's based on a comic and the story existed beforehand), but this movie really outdid itself with a plot that's engaging and extremely compelling. And to top it all off, Logan is in no hurry to set up another X-Men movie and thus it tells a much more complete story. I only wish the other two solo Wolverine movies could've been this good. Logan is an absolutely wonderful finale.