Logan

Guys, you all know I'm as critical of the decade-long glut of comic book movies as anyone. I only end up seeing about half of them, and for half of those I'm kind of "eh" at best. X-Men in particular has been a huge source of "not giving a fuck" for me - there are so goddamn many of them, and only like three or four ever even matter! So when everyone and Trevor called Logan one of the best movies of the year I just sort of shrugged and thought, great, here we go again, people are going nuts over an X-Men movie. I'll just never understand the appeal!

Well, folks. I went ahead and saw Logan, and holy crap, I loved it! I want to say as little about it as possible, because I think anyone reading this should go see it knowing as little as possible, but suffice it to say it succeeded where so many other comic book movies fail for me for a number of reasons. One was that it was emphatically standalone in nature. Yes, a background knowledge of who Wolverine and Charles Xavier are is helpful, but I haven't seen an X-Men movie since 2005 or so and could still follow absolutely everything. And while the ending leaves itself open for some sort of connected sequel, so much of this thing just feels like a coda, a period, an ending. (Am I being vague enough to avoid spoiling things? probably not, but whatever.)

This is a Western. It takes place in El Paso and in North Dakota and everywhere in between. It also takes place in the future. it feels a little like Mad Max: Fury Road for a variety of reasons it's best not to get into. It also feels like The Last of Us, the video game whose story made waves for being so good and powerful and unexpected a few years ago. It's also this hyper-violent R-rated thing that's just thrilling to watch. Like, Deadpool was this big success because everyone realized you could make a comic book movie with swearing and fucking and over-the-top amounts of choreographed gore, but it was still ultimately dumb and worthless in the way all of those comic book movies are; that it didn't take itself seriously ended up being less of a strength and more of a half-hearted defense for its own shortcomings. But Logan? Logan takes the same graphic violence and sticks it into a story where it makes an impact, with characters for whom it makes sense to be obscenely violent, and it does take itself seriously, and it just works so much goddamn better for it.

The whole thing is trope-laden and "predictable" at every turn, but chalk this up as an example of tropes being tropes for a reason, of Westerns having a very specific formula for a reason, and so on. Does Wolverine grunt out a painful "I never asked for any of this!" right as the third act breaks after shit's gone horribly wrong? Yes, of course he does. But it works! It fits! It doens't feel lazy, it just feels like the right decision.

Logan isn't going to end, or even redefine, the steady and constant trend of comic book movies that have been coming out at a steady clip for a decade now and will continue to do so for at least another five years. But it already feels like something dark and different like nothing has to me since The Dark Knight. In five or ten years, when the big retrospectives come out and look at the history and evolution of the comic book movie trends from 2005 to 2025 or whatever, Logan is going to hold a special place in that history, and rightly so.