The Problem with Logan

With the release of Avengers: Infinity War, there's only one Marvel movie anyone's writing about. Fortunately, I have my finger quite firmly on the pulse of the people, so I'll be writing about a movie that was released by a completely different studio over a year ago.

I'm so timely.

I saw this with a couple friends back when Logan first came out (back in ye olden days of 2017), and I have to tell you, I had high expectations. The first trailer (you know the one, the one with Hurt by Johnny Cash playing in the background) got me excited beyond all reason, and I'd read the Old Man Logan comics the movie was based on, and absolutely loved them. The worn-down, almost pacifist version of Logan, haunted by his past mistakes even more than usual, the country life and small family keeping him down to earth, while also giving him something to lose, the bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, the road trip structure where Logan and Clint encounter supervillain after supervillain one at a time, the Logan vs Red Skull fight, and the whole finale...basically, the original Old Man Logan is one of my favorite comic miniseries. I love just about everything about it.

Now, I knew Logan was going to be pretty different from the comics by necessity. When the two main antagonists, the Hulk and Red Skull, are owned by another studio, you've obviously got to make some pretty big changes to make the movie work. Plus, the whole "cross country road-trip" thing worked much better as an episodic miniseries than it would as a movie. But when that first trailer came out, any potential worries I might have had for the movie went right out the window.

One of my friends sent me an email right after the trailer dropped.

"So...is this basically The Last of Us: The Movie, but starring Wolverine?" he asked.

I rewatched the trailer. Old, embittered man with graying hair and a beard making his way across the American countryside, protecting a girl that holds the key to the future, growing closer to her over time, and savagely murdering any survivors and soldiers who would dare lay a finger on her. Yup, that was basically The Last of Us, but with Joel swapped out for Wolverine and Ellie replaced with Laura. Add the presence of a guitar strumming mournfully in the background, and the trailers were even similar.

"Yeah," I said.

"Dude, that's awesome!"

The Logan of Us, coming soon to Playstation Theaters...

They'd clearly put a lot of effort into pointing out similarities between their plot and characters and those of The Last of Us. And, honestly, no one I knew minded. Wolverine fits the Joel mold so well that I started to wonder if Joel was supposed to be based on Hugh Jackman's interpretation of Wolverine from the very beginning. When you stop to think about it, the basic ideas behind The Last of Us fit with the ideas and themes from Old Man Logan: road-trip through a post apocalyptic America, a vague suspicion of everyone you meet, a world-weary but savage protagonist fighting for what little remains of his family, the problem of saving the world conflicting with saving what you love, if it's even possible at all. The trailer, partly through this comparison, but also just through its imagery and structure, conveyed a very clear idea: Logan is going to be in the dumps at the beginning, he's going to take Laura under his wing at Xavier's behest, he'll eventually grow close to her, and when the bad guys come for her, we'll get to see Wolverine at his most brutal. Plus, now it's rated R so brutality ahoy!

So as we were sitting in the theater, waiting for the movie to start, we were getting pretty excited. Once the movie got going, however, a couple problems surfaced. The opening scenes were all right, and did a good job of setting the tone, but one of them in particular set off some alarms in the back of my head. There's a scene of Logan driving various people around, and all of these people suck, and you really feel for Logan here, but one of them features these random girls on their way to a party, and one of them randomly flashes the camera. It's pointless, it adds nothing to the movie. This isn't a nudity movie. In fact, after this one gratuitous scene, there will be exactly no nudity for the rest of the movie (Hugh Jackman doesn't even take off his shirt that often). Literally all this does is say "Hey everyone, this is an R-rated movie, look what we can do." And that isn't good filmmaking. That's a wasted scene. It took me out of the world, it made everyone in the theater go "What?" very audibly. And I get that you want to make it clear that this movie is rated R, but a) the first action scene did that just fine, and b) there's an action scene in 15 minutes where a 12-year old girl decapitates a grown man on screen and then proceeds to do the same thing to about five other guys in 20 seconds.

Seriously, this girl kills at least 20 men over the course of the film.
...
And I love it.

That does a pretty good job of saying "we're R-rated now, so we don't have to hold back", it establishes Laura as a badass after Logan's own heart, AND it fits the movie. So if it wasn't to establish the tone of the movie, introduce an important character (the girls never come back), or introduce a future plot point...what's the point of that scene? Other than to revel in what R-rated flicks can get away with. Which a) isn't good filmmaking, and b) reveals a certain lack of focus on the director's part. Which continues to cause problems down the line.

Logan's healing factor is slowing down, you see, which is why he can age and has scars now. On its own, this isn't a bad idea, even if it's almost the exact plot of The Wolverine. Logan's vulnerable now (again), and he can theoretically even be killed, in spite of his adamantium skeleton. The problem lies in the execution of this idea. In The Wolverine, a scientist ran an experiment on Logan to halt his healing factor; this was a very smart, very rich man who spent his entire life working out how to do exactly that. In Logan, the reason for his regeneration slowing is...adamantium poisoning. Apparently his adamantium skeleton has been slowing his regeneration all along, but nobody noticed for 50 years (Logan is set in 2029, while X-Men Origins: Wolverine has him get his adamantium bones on or before 1979). Also the future timeline of Days of Future Past takes place in 2023, and he had barely aged at all, and showed no signs of being poisoned or not healing as quickly, so I guess it requires over 45 years of buildup before there are any visible affects. Also adamantium is a metal, and isn't even a little radioactive, so there's no reason for it to poison him unless his body is rejecting it (which would have happened 50 years ago) or unless bits of it are flaking off somehow (but adamantium is unbreakable). So...yeah...that didn't make a lot of sense. It was suitably tragic, but it didn't fit with anything else.

There's also a plotline where they mention that mutants aren't being born anymore. But the eventual explanation is that the government was putting drugs in the corn and in the water to target the mutant gene. This is basically delivered by the villain (I refuse to refer to him by any other name than Darwin Mayflower, since he's literally still playing the same role as he did in Hudson Hawk) as a quick aside, over the course of maybe one line. Other than that, it doesn't affect much, and it's never dealt with afterwards. Apparently the secret to stopping the mutant menace wasn't Sentinels, it was corn. Who knew?

Maybe the GMO corn and the cloning labs were based on
lost Da Vinci inventions?

Still, the "mutants are dying" plotline serves as little more than a cool line for the trailer and some pointless world building, which this movie has a lot of. There's a scene where Logan helps out some random farmers, and spends maybe 15 or 20 minutes hearing about all their troubles and woes, only for them to be brutally murdered 5 minutes later (apparently stopping to spend the night at a defenseless farm when hardened killers are chasing you is a bad idea, which Logan even acknowledges before he...does it anyway). There's also about 5 minutes devoted to these driverless trucks that have taken the place of our current delivery trucks. One of them malfunctions and nearly hits our heroes, and that's the last we see of them. Yup. Really essential to have a scene with driverless trucks going through this...really, really rural countryside when literally no other vehicles in the movie are driverless. That added a lot to the plot. I mean, it's a cool idea, and might even be a thing in a few years, but in a movie like this it's just one more bit of world building that contributes nothing to the plot and, given how much like a western this movie feels...it seems really out of place. I mean, it works as an idea in I, Robot because omnipresent automation (and the dangers it presents) is one of the main themes (a theme that's reinforced when vehicles on auto-pilot start trying to kill Will Smith). Here it's mostly just a throwaway scene. There's also a running plotline of Canada being a safe haven for mutants, which everyone seems to agree is probably true, even when it's eventually implied that there is no safe haven for mutants. At which point, everyone's goal is still to get to Canada.

There's also a scene with Xavier, to indicate his mental illness, where he just starts spouting nonsense, and Patrick Stewart sells this scene, but his string of nonsense ends, and I kid you not, with text lifted from a Taco Bell commercial for the quesalupa. The director, James Mangold, has even admitted that he couldn't think of what else to write, so he just lifted a quesalupa commercial and stuck it into the movie (Taco Bell had sent him the commercial because they were looking to advertise in the movie, but he apparently never agreed to the deal and never took their money...while advertising for Taco Bell anyway). Again, this movie is set in the future, with driverless trucks and clones and cybernetic limbs, where the adventures of Logan and the X-Men are so far in the past that they've become little more than legends (and comic book characters, in my personal favorite easter egg, even if it was lifted right out of Captain America: The First Avenger), and Xavier makes a reference to a 2010s Taco Bell menu item. It takes you out of the world (it certainly took me out of the world), it adds nothing to the plot, and just indicates that the director wasn't sure what he was doing with that scene.

Out of ideas for meaningful dialogue? Taco Bell's got you covered.

Most of the stuff immediately after this scene is pretty good. They develop a fun family dynamic between Logan, Laura, and Xavier, with Xavier being the crazy grandpa, Laura the semi-psychotic daughter (especially relevant since she's technically Logan's clone), and Logan the exasperated father trying to keep both of them out of trouble. During these scenes, Logan and Laura have a fun dynamic, where Logan's trying to be as good an influence as he can, while still being himself, resulting in a scene where he stops her from shoplifting and attacking a random cashier, then apologizes to the guy and steals from the store anyway.

Where things really start to go awry is around the middle of the movie. Xavier is dead, and the bad guys are just about to reveal their secret weapon. Now they've hyped this superweapon of theirs throughout the entire movie. They don't need to take care of the genetic offspring of older mutants anymore, they don't need to make an army out of them, like they originally planned. After all, they have this superweapon. And when they finally reveal it...

And it's another Wolverine. It's exactly like our Wolverine in every way, except they grew it in a vat (nevermind that cloning doesn't work like that, and that the movie even admits cloning doesn't work like that, which is why Laura is a child). So he's actually stronger than our Wolverine because his adamantium poisoning still has 40+ years before it starts having any effects. And you know this Wolverine is pure evil because he has a darker shirt (my guess is there was the script for Superman III sitting next to that quesalupa commercial when Mangold was out of ideas). Apparently the whole "brainwash children into becoming perfect mutant soldiers" thing didn't work out (no joke, they actually forgot the brainwashing part, which might have explained why literally none of these future child soldiers are even remotely obedient), so they decided to create a fully grown clone of a man known for his berserker rage and savage bloodlust and try to control him instead. Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.

First they came for the quesalupa commercials, and we said nothing. Then
they came for the plot of Superman III, and still we said nothing.

I guess filmmakers still haven't realized that having two identical people punching each other in a dark environment is confusing, so here we go. Fortunately, this is Logan, so you can always work out which one's the evil clone by looking for whoever is currently winning. Because it certainly won't be Logan. 

This begins the part of the movie where Logan is, quite frankly, useless. He gets the crap kicked out of him by his Mirror Universe double (look he even did the Mirror Universe thing of having different facial hair), he gets dragged along the last part of the way by Laura, he gets saved by a bunch of kids (mutant child soldiers, yes, but kids nonetheless), and so on. The kids figure out a way to temporarily fix his regeneration (that's convenient). The kids all come up with a plan, and Logan just sits there. He doesn't say "Look, I'm the adult here, so here's what we're doing". He just kind of lets them do their own thing. Even in the climactic battle, he kills a couple mooks, but none of the named baddies. The kids take all the actual villains out, while New Jackman starts kicking the teeth out of Jackman Classic. One of the named villains gets taken out by a cluster of kids that we have spent, at most, 10 minutes with. So there's no real emotional payoff. We don't care about these kids. We haven't had time to. We do care about Logan (who gets his butt kicked) and Laura (who does all the actual work). 

Now, in fairness, the start of the battle has Logan effectively supercharging his healing factor using the healing potions the kids conveniently brought along, which leads to a scene where he's going on a rampage through the woods, killing all of the half-dozen soldiers in his path. He does this because the bad guys have set a trap for the kids (after Logan let the kids and Laura leave on their own). But he doesn't really do much to alter the tide of battle here, as Laura and the kids are more than well-equipped to handle these soldiers. While there is a moment where things look bad for Laura, she's faced worse odds earlier in the movie, so she could clearly handle things here.

But clearly there's an inverse ninja law thing going on here, because Logan's super healing potion runs out as soon as he's done dealing with mooks and has to face named villains. He winds up getting savagely mauled by Newverine while the kids deal with everyone else, and then Laura manages to take out Clone-Logan (Clogan, if you will). There's a heartfelt farewell scene between Logan and Laura, and then he just basically bleeds out and dies. Then they have a funeral for him and Laura takes the cross one of the kids set up and turns it to look like an X. 

Get it? It's an X. Because he was in the X-Men. Get it guys?

What do you mean literally everyone saw that coming?

(For more on why the X-grave maker is a bad idea, see this article, which also has a much more positive outlook on the movie and discusses a lot of its overarching themes)

And that's basically it. That's the movie.

So, like I said, the movie's pretty good. It just doesn't go all the way to great. Sloppy world building and some moments of unfocused directing don't help, but they're not the big downside here. The main problem with Logan is the relationship between Logan and Laura. While Xavier's around, it's pretty good, solid character work. Dad-Logan is fun to watch. But once Xavier dies that just sort of goes away. They still have one or two moments, but they're mostly moments of Logan not wanting to do any of this and Laura having to either do it for him, or cajole him into doing it. They start off the "Man begrudgingly takes in orphan, slowly develops feelings for her, and then becomes a surrogate father" thing, but they don't really develop it much, until the very end of the movie where they basically clap their hands and say "Yup, and that's the end of their arc. They're father and daughter now. Setup be darned."

But a lot of the problem, too, is that, after the fight at the beginning of the movie, Logan doesn't really...do much. He mostly complains about things and gets his butt handed to him. And I don't know about you, but I go to see Wolverine in movies to see him tear through mooks like paper and go toe-to-toe with savage and seemingly unbeatable foes and come out on top. We want Wolverine to feel powerful and brutal. And Old Man Logan showed that you could still have an old, weary Logan feel like a badass. But all the best action scenes involve someone who isn't Logan. He has two brief moments of world-weary toughness at the very beginning and end of the movie, but he doesn't really drive the plot. He doesn't move the plot at all, actually. He just reacts to it. It isn't until the very end of the movie that Logan makes a meaningful decision that affects the plot, and it's a decision that he honestly should have made earlier, but didn't because they needed to pad out the running time a bit.

Again, Logan is a good movie. But it's far from the best Marvel movie of all time. It's not even the best X-Men movie, and if The Wolverine didn't have that stupid boss fight at the end, it wouldn't even be the best Wolverine movie. There are some great character moments, but also some wasted ones. The villains are pretty forgettable and, aside from Hulkverine, aren't even much of a threat. They don't even have any real connection to Wolverine, other than having gotten some of his DNA at an unspecified point in the past.

There's also a lot of wasted characters. People show up and take up screentime, but don't really contribute anything to the plot. The farmers, for example, as well as Darwin Mayflower (who I'm sure has a different movie but he was so forgettable this was the only way I could remember him). Even the tough-looking dude with the robot arm (Pierce, I think his name was) doesn't really do much to establish himself as a threat. Maybe if they had made him the clone of Wolverine (but slowly grown in a vat over 30 years or something), and had that as the big reveal, maybe that would have been a bit better. Or maybe if, instead of a Wolverine clone, the big monster had turned out to be some cybernetically enhanced, roided-out version of the Juggernaut, or something more interesting than "It's Wolverine but evil this time".

Basically, Logan is a good movie that fell well below the expectations set by its trailer (Logan doesn't make too many people hurt in this movie, to be honest), and mired by some clumsy screenplay and directorial decisions. As with a lot of more recent movies (looking at you, Moana) the problems start in the middle, and by the time the movie is past them, it doesn't have enough time to fix those problems and finish up the movie. All the acting, however, is top notch. The music is great, and the fights are brutal and gory enough to almost satisfy any Wolverine fan who felt that the X-Men movies had sanitized him too much. If only he'd gotten more time to be badass, and if they'd focused a bit more on actually developing his relationship with Laura, it could have been a great movie and a truly worthy sendoff to Hugh Jackman's Wolverine.

I shall leave you all with the famous words from the man himself...

Deal with it, bub.