Consequences

Rating: 8/10 (7 March 2017)

It's about time for the X-men franchise. They were early pioneers in the modern day superhero movies, but they didn't evolve, and were outshined by the MCU-productions that elevated the genre to a new level. Light hearted superhero action films are now a dime a dozen, and no one does it better than Marvel studios.
Nolan brought Batman in the opposite direction, in stead of light hearted, he made films that took themselves seriously. Later DC movies continued this trend, with Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. The X-men franchise reacted to this (and the Marvel movies) by going in a completely different direction: Deadpool, a movie that doesn't take anything seriously. Its success could easily a unraveled the entire franchise into "edgy" Deadpool-like movies, but instead they opted to make a movie that not only takes superheroes seriously, but takes itself seriously. With Logan, there's an X-men movie that does not shy away from the bleak, and exploring the actual consequences of the themes they've already been rambling about for several movies.
Logan is a dark and bleak movie. There are fun scenes and a healthy dose of black comedy, but it's mostly a movie that beats up both the characters you've gotten to know, and the ones you've just been introduced to. And it shows how everything in the fictionally world they're in have consequences. It's not just another movie that you watch, and at the end nothing much has changed. It's a result of a divided world, the extreme suppression of mutants, and so on. Obviously what happens in the film will also have consequences for the characters involved in it, and while this is hinted at, I think they could have gone further in exploring how the extreme violence would/could affect the young characters in the film.
The soundtrack is good, the visuals are sometimes really good, and the acting is fantastic. Both Stewart and Jackman blows it out of the park.