A slog through depressing Western tropes...starring Wolverine

Rating: 5/10 (20 September 2017)

This movie is a Western. Let me get this out of the way first and foremost- I love westerns. I do not like westerns that remove the tropes, allegory, and character arcs from the setting of the old west and transpose it somewhere else. Perhaps that is just my opinion, but the setting is intrinsic to a large part of the narratives that westerns often use.
Director James Mangold clearly loves films like The Searchers, True Grit, A Fistful of Dollars, and Shane- Logan is rife with references. It telegraphs the plot, uses very obvious foreshadowing, and paints its obvious plot out for you. You know what's going to happen, in spite of how much you don't want it to. And I really didn't want it to.
This film has zero fun factor whatsoever. It's a hideously depressing film, one that doesn't celebrate the history of the character of Wolverine or use him in the comic-book context with which we are so accustomed. Instead, this hyper-realistic version of the universe has just about everything that could turn off someone looking to have fun. Perhaps brutal nihilism in the face of your own growing mortality is one person's idea of a good superhero movie. Not for me. This is Wolverine, not Neil Gaiman or Jhonen Vasquez creations.
Perhaps this is why the film got such a great reception: it is not a prototypical superhero film. But it isn't a very ambitious film, either, just a film that plays with genre expectations in one specific way in order to completely copy elements of older films. Even the cinematography is lengthy, uninspired, and wholly traditional. Even the plot follows a rinse-repeat formula reminiscent of the Man with No Name films. The saving grace of the film stems from its obvious influences, because if you copy enough good movies you'll eventually make some good narrative choices. The plot isn't bad, it's derivative. The movie isn't poorly made, it's poorly conceived.
I simply ask one thing of superhero and comic book films: Even if it is dark or r-rated, it still has to be entertaining. Logan is not. It;'s anti-fun, sucking energy from every person who views it. Logan has some fantastic performances and calls back to a lot of great old Westerns, but it's not a good superhero movie because it made me uncomfortably depressed, bored, and begrudgingly disappointed at how traditional, derivative, and copycat the movie is, and how much it utterly failed at being fun.