Logan's last stand is first X-Men masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (3 March 2017)

X-Men fans - not to mention Hugh Jackman himself - finally get the Wolverine film they deserve in this brutal, bloody and brilliant last hurrah for the adamantine-clawed anti-hero. It's 2029, and a physically and spiritually burnt-out Logan is chauffeuring anything from funerals to hen nights, raising enough cash to get the drugs required by former mentor and head of the X-Men school, Charles Xavier, whose dementia now threatens to turn his Cerebro-enhanced noggin into a weapon of mass destruction. With mutants all but extinct - one survivor being Stephen Merchant's albino sun-shirker, who tends to the Professor while Logan earns his doe - the desperate pleading of a Mexican nurse convinces the last remaining X-Man to abandon his descent into booze and self- pity. His quarry is a young girl, short on speech but high (make that VERY high) on the kind of special skill set that Logan should recognise...especially when it's revealed that she is the result of a secret-ops attempt to turn mutants into soldiers at the behest of the kind of crazy, ruthless Doctor (Richard E Grant, in typical oily Brit persona) that these films demand. Spurred as much by the suggestion the girl may in fact be his daughter, Logan flees with the Professor and his new- found charge in harness, while a mobilised army of ruthless mercenaries chase them from Mexico to Las Vegas and beyond, all the time just one step behind this ersatz family of mutant misfits. Tagged as being the last appearance (of nine) by Jackman in his signature role, Logan delights in its influences from westerns to road movies, lending the film an anthemic and elegiac tone. While shorn of the PG-13 audience, finally the full brutality of a knife-wielding hero finds its visceral voice in a series of bone-crunching, head-splitting set pieces that more than warrant the film's 15 certificate. But amidst the carnage and the bouncing severed heads, Logan finds the level of character-led and emotive storytelling that the 'parent' X-films rarely delivered. You genuinely care about our protagonists, and when Logan's last stand finally comes (with far more satisfaction than the subtitled X-Men outing of 2006) it's both satisfying and strangely subdued, eschewing much of the CG-led grandstanding of previous entries for a more cathartic and affecting conclusion. This is grown-up, adult comic-book fare in every sense, and as a result provides both X-philes and followers of the nine (and counting) film series with its first, genuine masterpiece.