“Logan” Will Change How You Think About Violence In Superhero Movies
Hugh Jackman in Logan Ben Rothstein / Twentieth Century Fox
Hugh Jackman in Logan
Logan starts with a fight, because fighting is what its title character, even gray-haired and grizzled, is famous for. Other X-Men might be possessed with the ability to read minds or to shapeshift or to control the weather, but Logan (alias Wolverine, alias James Howlett) was conceived with more straightforward ends. He’s equipped with adamantium claws, an indestructible skeleton, and accelerated healing, all the better to dole out and endure pain. He’s built to fight.
Hugh Jackman has played Logan in some capacity in nine X-Men movies now, and the character comes out swinging in most of them. So there’s nothing unexpected about the fact that he does the same at the start of Logan: He wakes up to find a group of men attempting to steal the tires off the vehicle he’s been sleeping in. What is surprising, however, is that when he rams his claws through one guy’s skull, there’s a spray of carnage, a juicy, smashed-pumpkin thunk of organic matter giving way to sharpened metal. It’s a moment as disorienting as leaving a bar after a long night to wince at the discovery that the sun is up. Logan has killed dozens and dozens of people over the erratic highs and lows of the X-Men films, but it’s never been shown like that, never in a way that actually demanded we feel it.
Logan, which director James Mangold wrote with Scott Frank and Michael Green, is a bruisingly good elegy for the version of Wolverine that Jackman has played for 17 years and is finally retiring. But it’s more than that — it’s a meditation on the way violence has been portrayed in the franchise, and in the larger superhero genre it’s part of. Logan, the lovably gruff, cigar-chomping through line of the X-Men films, has become over the years a flagship representative of the video-game-with-the-gore-turned-off sensibility that keeps things PG-13 — one in which an infinite number of deaths can be racked up so long as the fleshy results of the slaughter aren’t shown.
Logan
It’s an unendingly strange compromise the powers that be in Hollywood have arrived at, that brutality is safe for wide consumption so long as its explicit repercussions are elided. What better symbol has there been for that concession than Logan, who has sliced and stabbed his way through battalions of characters with relentless kickassery, but is inevitably the only one who is shown bleeding, since his wounds quickly shrink shut? Logan can’t be permanently hurt and might be able to live forever, the embodiment of consequence-free force who in this new movie suddenly and abruptly is surrounded by consequences after all. When limbs get lopped off and torsos get eviscerated, it doesn’t feel like spectacle, it feels like an unveiling of the butchery that was there all along. Logan plays like the films that came before it are a dream…