Logan is a masterpiece. It is the greatest Wolverine film, the finest X-Men film, and one of the greatest superhero films ever made. James Mangold's 2017 farewell to Hugh Jackman's seventeen-year portrayal of the character is a film of extraordinary emotional power and remarkable craft, a western-inflected character study that uses the superhero framework to tell a deeply moving story about mortality, legacy, and the possibility of redemption. Hugh Jackman's final performance as Wolverine is the most accomplished work of his franchise career, and Patrick Stewart's final performance as Professor X ranks among the best work of his career. Logan is not merely a great superhero film. It is a great film.
At a Glance
Director: James Mangold
Runtime: 137 minutes
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant
Release: 2017
Critics Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars, a masterpiece)
Audience Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars, a genre landmark)
Review Breakdown
Plot
In 2029, mutants are nearly extinct. Logan is working as a limousine driver near the Mexican border, slowly dying as his healing factor fails and the adamantium in his skeleton poisons him. He is caring for an ailing and increasingly dangerous Professor X, whose degenerative brain disease causes seizures that are lethal to those around him. When a young girl named Laura arrives in his life, he is drawn into a final journey across America to bring her to safety. The plot is structured as a road movie with the moral weight of a frontier story, achieving a mythic resonance the more conventionally plotted franchise entries could not.
Characters
Hugh Jackman's Logan is the franchise's finest character achievement, a man at the end of his extraordinary life who finds hope again, briefly and painfully, in his relationship with Laura. Jackman plays the character's physical deterioration and emotional exhaustion with a conviction and a vulnerability that makes every scene feel genuinely costly. Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier is the film's other great performance, a man of immense intelligence reduced by illness to frightening fragility, and Stewart plays the character's confusion, lucidity, and love for Logan with a depth and grace that makes his eventual fate one of the most affecting moments in the franchise. Dafne Keen's Laura stands as one of the most compelling child performances in recent superhero cinema, a character of ferocious physicality and quiet emotional depth who earns her place as Logan's successor entirely on her own terms. Boyd Holbrook's Donald Pierce is a villain of adequate menace and considerable wit. Stephen Merchant's Caliban provides a warm and unexpectedly moving secondary emotional thread through his loyalty and eventual sacrifice.
Tone
Mangold pitches the film as a western, and the approach is entirely successful. Logan has the weight, the dust, and the moral seriousness of the greatest American westerns, a film that uses the superhero framework to tell a story about the end of a certain kind of heroism and the possibility of passing something worth preserving to the next generation. The film's violence is brutal and consequential in ways the franchise's more action-focused entries never attempted.
Meaning / Themes
Logan is a film about mortality and the possibility of a good death, about what it means to have lived a life of violence and whether redemption is possible at its end. Logan's relationship with Laura is the film's central thematic statement: the legacy of a life is not what you have done but what you have made possible for those who come after you. The film's use of Shane gives this theme a mythic dimension that makes it feel genuinely universal. Charles Xavier's final lucid moments are the film's most emotionally devastating sequence.
Direction
Mangold's direction is the most accomplished in the franchise's history, with a command of character, atmosphere, and emotional precision that gives the film a coherence and a distinctiveness the genre rarely achieves. The action sequences are staged with physical clarity and visceral intensity that makes them feel genuinely consequential. Marco Beltrami's spare, atmospheric score is the franchise's most distinctive and perfectly complements the western tone.
Cultural Reception
Logan was a critical and commercial triumph on its release, earning widespread acclaim as one of the most accomplished superhero films ever made and generating significant awards attention, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, the first such nomination for a superhero film. Its R-rating and its willingness to treat the character's story as a serious drama rather than a franchise exercise were widely credited with demonstrating that the genre could sustain work of real artistic ambition. Its influence on subsequent superhero filmmaking has been considerable, and its reputation has only grown in the years since its release. It remains the benchmark against which character-driven superhero films are measured.
Who Should Watch
Essential viewing for everyone. Logan transcends its genre entirely, working as a moving drama about mortality and legacy as much as a superhero film. Those who have never seen an X-Men film will find a film that requires no prior knowledge to appreciate.
Final Verdict: A masterpiece of popular cinema and the finest film in the X-Men franchise. Hugh Jackman's farewell to Wolverine is the defining performance of his franchise career, Patrick Stewart's final appearance as Professor X represents some of the most powerful work of his career, and James Mangold's direction gives the material an emotional power and a moral seriousness that the genre has rarely matched. Logan is not merely a great superhero film. It is a great film.
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