Review of Logan (2017) by Tal G — 08 Apr 2018

An intriguing film.

The story's told in a very minimalist and reserved manner, opting to quietly imply and let us figure most of it out by ourselves. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I could intellectually understand what was the reasoning for this or that, but I barely felt any emotional connection to what was happening.

The plot was as simple as they come. Nothing new in that department, besides the absolutely shattered status of the X-Men which is kind of an interesting idea. The actual plot though is just standard. This movie heavily relies on its character study of old man Logan and a bit of old geriatric man Xavier. Both of them were done well. The claws action was visceral and intense. The makeup was great.

My problems are these;.

Meandering action sequences (the first one with all the cars outside of Xavier's hideout).

Baffling character choices that don't make sense (tagging along with the black family).

Forced subversion during Xavier's burial scene (it's an intriguing idea on paper, but it was executed a little bit clumsily, not elegant at all and I didn't felt the movie earned that kind of treatment of Xavier).

Weak finale with all the powerful mutant kids barely putting up a fight and weirdly abandoning Logan to fight by himself while Laura went ham (we didn't see anything about Laura being especially trained in combat, so I assume that the rest also went through combat training).

Unremarkable cinematography, very run of the mill scene compositions and framing. Felt like a tv show, barely felt like a movie.

Laura's hamfisted perfect recitation of the old cowboy movie monologue she somehow managed to fully memorize after one viewing. Didn't know her power was perfect memory. It was one of those "kid movie talks like an adult" movie syndromes.

The stupid Donald character that didn't deserve to be in as much of this movie as he was.

This movie was fine, I didn't suffer, but it did bug me that this movie was being talked about as an A++ movie, when it was simply an above average superhero movie.