If this is a Western, Logan is very reminiscent of broken-down antiheroes!

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2018)

Like Clint Eastwood's William Munny in Unforgiven-a trained killer nursing decades of regret and sorrow, with enough juice for one last mission.
The dirty little secret few critics dare mention is that James Mangold's last film, The Wolverine, was just as good as Logan, if not better.
Mangold proudly wears his influences on his sleeve; a pivotal scene sees Xavier and Laura watching a clip from George Stevens's seminal 1953 film Shane, about another grim gunfighter with a mysterious past. Logan prefers hand-to-hand combat, of course, but aside from that he's quite similar to Alan Ladd's character in that film, a trained killer who fought for the good guys but didn't consider himself one of them.
Mangold is an excellent director with a solid, unheralded resume (including the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the Sylvester Stallone neo-noir Cop Land). But Jackman and Stewart are, quite simply, why Logan works-they're why the film doesn't just feel like a cheap exercise in bloody violence, and why its subversion of typical superhero-movie tropes feels organic (unlike with the X-Men spinoff Deadpool). The actors bring warmth and grouchy humor to the story, barking at each other like the married couple they've become, as they go on a road trip north with their young ward in tow.
The story itself is a little all over the place-Logan and company ping-pong from location to location across the country, as the villainous Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a metal-armed bounty hunter, chases them in search of Laura. A long digression at the house of a friendly family of civilians feels a little forced; the film's bloody climax, involving a sniveling scientist (played to the hilt by Richard E. Grant) and another mysterious enemy, slightly overstays its welcome. No matter-anytime things get too out of hand, Jackman and Stewart are there to tether them back to earth, and at no point does a cosmic portal appear in the sky, or a giant purple supervillain start a monologue about magical gems.
"Logan" is Jackman's latest, and possibly last, portrayal of Wolverine, the Marvel superhero he has played since 2000. If this is his final run at the role (comic-book characters do have a way of making surprise comebacks, so I'm wary), it's a peculiar milestone worth noting-he's our first superhero actor to officially age out of a role, a testament to the extreme longevity of some of these franchises. Will we get another Logan one day? Quite likely, no matter how foolish a proposition that might be; this is a world with a new Han Solo and a new John McClane, after all. All the more reason to salute Jackman as he rides out into the sunset; that's Logan's chief task, and it succeeds splendidly.