Review of Logan (2017) by Tiberio S — 30 May 2018

Wow, Logan lovers seriously need to chill and cut out all this overreacting. You all bought into the hype of this being Hugh Jackman's last movie as the titular character, and you were sold. Sad. This mindlessly dull, visually unimaginative borefest is everything that's wrong with Hollywood. Mind you, after the smoke is cleared and the hype dies down, like Star Wars 7, you will all begin to see that this is not a good film. It's not that this is terribly bad filmmaking, it's just altogether uninteresting. Sure, it looks more gritty and realistic than other installments (except for the one flying Jackman shot, a tribute to a really corny idea started by Singer), but what does that amount to? This feels more like film sport than film art. If you're an aspiring filmmaker and you think this is what good filmmaking is, I hope you know that quitting is an option you should consider, and another career is a viable solution.

First of all, don't kid yourself, this is surely the same old shit, coated in an R-rating so you feel like a bad kid doing a dangerous thing behind your parents back. It amounts to taking a fantasy story about a little girl who can destroy anybody, who in real life would anihilate her, and forcing you to take it extremely seriously. Serious R-rated movie about mutants, ROFL! Mangold does everything he can to fight back against the wonderment and joy of the Bryan Singer films, which give us fun, color, and adventure. Instead, Mangold retreads the same ground as he did with The Wolverine - slow, tedious melodrama, long drawn out glorified violence within action sequences that have no stakes because once again the heroes can just destroy anything and the bad guys are a bunch of idiots for repeatedly contending.

And what are X-Men fans who have stuck by loyally for almost two decades treated to in the Wolverine's final outing? Sabretooth? Deadpool? Someone new and interesting? No, the climax is him vs him, and not in any kind of literary or psychologically symbolic form, but Logan vs his underdeveloped clone. All physical brawn, no brains, except for the adamantium bullet the clone takes. What a lame device. Nobody surrounding them is interesting, I don't even know who the villain is supposed to be... Luke Skywalker? What's with the hand thing, is that all he's got? I came to this film to see Patrick Stewart, he gave a solid performance, and the rest is disappointing.

And don't get me started on the Lord of the Flies gang - seriously people? You really should be ashamed of yourselves if this is what tickles your fancy. Little kids fighting adults should look more like Hook - this is appalling. This and the clone fight insufficiently make up the third act. Despite all the wonderful things Deadpool did, I still felt it came up short because of a lame, one-dimensional, colorless villain. I said that as long as they never make that mistake again, these movies could be amazing. I never thought they would reach lower into their pocket and pull out something as egregiously low as this hand guy. He might've been interesting had he tried having a human moment like masturbating and accidentally pulling his dick off because he couldn't control that lame contraption on his wrist. Anything at all would've been more interesting than the action film conventionalism we were spoon fed.

Ultimately, the idea of all this superpower crap is just silly, nobody should ever really buy it as it's sold. So why do I like some of them, and not others? I like the ones that have fun with it. Batman is the only good excuse for taking itself more seriously, and even that has to come in minimal doses; it still has to have fun to work, and Dark Knight gives us that fun in at least the form of Joker. If you're going to introduce these ideas, be bold and adventurous, go all the way with it. Days of Future Past introduces time travel and ripple effects, those are great sci-fi concepts. Apocalypse has a doomsday device with an equivalent counter in Phoenix. If it's going to take itself more seriously, the type of story has to allow for it, like in Unbreakable, which slowly unveils a truth that the audience isn't aware of... that simply can't happen in an established superhero franchise like X-Men, you can't fool an audience that way. And then there's the everything package that Kick-Ass gives us, introducing a very real world in a very comic book world with just the right balance of humor and drama that can only be expressed cinematically. I don't get how people can take Wolverine seriously in this context, but it proves we're living in an ever-increasing age where people are forcing themselves to be more serious about everything in life, and it sucks.