State of the Union

Rating: 6/10 (21 February 2017)

This is the third and final installment of the Wolverine series and the tenth X-men movie. In a post-apocalyptic near-future no mutants have been born for some time. Professor X (or Charles Xavier) is seriously ill and dependent on medication. He lives with a weakened Logan (or Wolverine) and Caliban in a rundown factory near the US border in Mexico. Logan has a job as limo driver and smuggles prescription drugs to Mexico for Charles. Disillusioned, their ultimate dream (and last wish for Charles) is buying a camper or boat and make a final retreat.
James Mangold has a typical directorial style you can almost instantly recognize: Relatively long tracking shots, slow in tension building, meanwhile freeing the camera to explore the space beyond the characters. Rest assured however that the action scenes are fast-paced and on the firm side of the R-rating, a bit gory here and there. In my opinion the movie could have been cut by some minutes, as it is overlong.
Jackman and Stewart are well known, but the real revelation here is the kid Laura (Dafne Keen), with a stunning performance reminiscent of Jodie Foster in Scorsese's early works when she had about the same age. At the world premiere I attended she also stole several moments.
After 9/11 we saw an outburst of movies that directly or indirectly referenced the event. The ascent of the current US administration will be another such watershed moment where movies will directly or indirectly criticize new policies. Although this was shot before the election there are several eerie parallels in the script to the current themes in US society and politics: Disillusionment (simple wishes of Logan cannot be realized), availability of health care, illegal immigrants, border politics, Canada (not the US) as Eden, the promised land. Medical experimentation by US companies inside Mexico and most striking: the dreamers. There is a central theme throughout the movie about dreams and reality, made more poignant here by the reference to the X-Men comic books themselves.
Most of the time Marvel movies are too predictable and straightforward for me; this is (like and again unlike Deadpool) different. See it for yourself!