Picket or Flick it Movie reviews and Entertianment.
(The Picket)- When one thinks of Wolverine from the X-Men it is impossible to avoid the image of a fit Hugh Jackman in an intense fight scene baring his claws or his yellow spandex covered comic book counterpart. We expect the action sequences and bloody fights, what we don’t expect is heavy human emotion.
In Logan, director James Mangold gives us a new and different journey for Jackman’s Logan aka Wolverine and Patrick Stewart’s professor Charles Xaiver. The two powerful heroes are displayed well past their prime and beaten down, with scenes showing Stewart’s professor X having seizures and Jackman’s Logan aging and becoming ill, it has a very odd tone.
This new aging Logan is loosely based on the Marvel comic Old Man Logan and gives Jackman more emotion to work with than he has had in the previous 17 years of playing this same character. This Wolverine has to deal with the guilt of taking care of Charles, the grind of trying to live a life, depression, and tendencies to self-harm. The characters then go from this place of more gritty human darkness to a second chance at learning to care through the help of a little girl who is Logan’s genetically engineered daughter, Laura played by young newcomer Dafne Keen.
Keen, Stewart, and Jackman share a number of beautifully emotional scenes, most memorably and oddly placed domestic dinner scene with a farming family that give the film a sort of warm, the family they have been denied feeling. This is made more heart wrenching the tragedies that soon follow.
The film is loaded with beautiful lighting and cinematography, in some ways it feels like the old westerns in references in conversation with Laura and Professor X. We expect Logan to ride off in the sunset with the children he rescues, but we are denied that perfect happiness and instead given a bittersweet sacrifice for the future of mutant kind. Jackman’s Logan goes out in a blaze of glory fighting for people he tried so very hard not to care about.
This would be a Pick-it Movie for fans of X-men and then some, it more than makes up for some of the frivolous origin stories and stand alone wolverine movies we have been feed in the past. Logan is passionate beautiful eulogy to a set of characters that made their way in to film and comic fans hearts everywhere. This swan song of the Marvel Fox pictures is well worth the watch and the love.
Jessica Sharpless is a reporter for the Picket and can be contacted at jsharp02@rams.shepherd.edu
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