It’s official: Logan is one of the most critically acclaimed superhero movies since The Dark Knight. Its critical and commercial success is richly merited, but something of a shock considering that just eight years ago, the stand-alone Wolverine trilogy began with the clumsily titled, shockingly misconceived X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Origins made enough money to keep the franchise going—but in terms of quality, critical appeal, and popular appeal, it was a lot closer to Batman & Robin than it was to Batman Begins. Bad as it was, though, the movie also serves as a helpful blueprint for what not to do in a superhero movie—and watching it again proves that Logan succeeds largely by doing the opposite of what Origins did at every turn.
The primary advantage of a Wolverine solo movie is that it puts the focus squarely on a standout character with both animal magnetism and emotional depth. So why is Origins in such an awful hurry to sideline Wolverine in order to highlight a battery of other mutants, each seemingly worse and more misguided than the last?
The film’s worst crime may be its treatment of Deadpool, which almost ended the character’s cinematic life before it began. Yes, this was the first movie that cast Ryan Reynolds in the role of Wade Wilson, a chatterbox, wisecracking mercenary who becomes a smartass, mercenary mutant super-killer. And yes, he’s introduced as a watered-down, PG-13 but still moderately amusing version of the badass who conquered pop culture last year. Then Deadpool disappears for over an hour—and when he returns, the man/mutant known popularly as the “Merc with the Mouth” has somehow become a brainwashed, personality-free, attitudinally challenged Merc with his mouth sewn shut. If Origins had intentionally set out to depict Deadpool in a way that would enrage fans and play against the character’s strengths, it couldn’t have done a better job.
Deadpool is joined by a rogue’s gallery of ill-conceived Wolverine foils: Fred Dukes/The Blob (Kevin Durand), a Southern-fried pile of goo who looks and acts like Jabba the Hut crossed with The Dukes Of Hazzard’s Boss Hog; Will.i.am, as teleporting mutant John Wraith, who manages to wear out his welcome despite only being on-screen a few minutes; and Taylor Kitsch as Remy LeBeau/Gambit, a mutant cardsharp who’s essentially a Mardi Gras float that somehow became sentient and developed superpowers. (After Deadpool and Wolverine, Gambit is the next mistreated Origins character due for redemption: Channing Tatum is attached to star as LeBeau in a long-gestating stand-alone film that will likely shoot in 2018.)
X-Men: Origins at least attempts, intermittently, to capture the angst that has long defined Wolverine. It aspires to tragedy, but has to settle for merely being dour. It is devoid of genuine pathos, yet full of Wolverine howling with emo rage whenever someone close to him dies.
Origins is a film of compromise and calculation, a movie where the elements that aren’t shopworn and arbitrary are egregiously wrong. It is a film without conviction, without insight. And thankfully, the team behind the insanely lucrative but tricky X-Men franchise seemed to understand that. In a red-carpet interview for the British premiere of X-Men: Days Of Future Past in 2014, producer Lauren Shuler Donner laughingly implored the public, “Just forget about X-3. And the first Wolverine [Origins]? Forget about that too.”
So after Origins, Fox was smart enough to hand over keys to the Wolverine franchise to Heavy and Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold, a serious filmmaker whose direction of movies like Walk the Line illustrated his gift for tortured, self-loathing, and larger-than-life anti-heroes. The X-Men movies are, after all, meant to be “about outsiders and grounded characters,” as Shuler Donner recently told Vanity Fair—with the exception of Origins, which has little to say about the larger social and political issues the franchise has been addressing for decades in multiple media.
Enter Logan—a film with the courage of its convictions, a movie whose darkness, profanity, and sometimes stomach-churning violence feel not only organic and justified but necessary. It’s a powerful comment on the anxiety-fraught lives of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, caught between countries and worlds. And it’s also a film with real heart and soul, perhaps best exemplified in its treatment of Professor X.
Patrick Stewart pops up at the very end of Origins for reasons that have everything to do with branding and cross-promotion, and nothing to do with the demands of the story. He’s supposed to be playing a younger version of Professor Xavier, but the C.G.I. employed is so jarringly off that he looks about as human as Jar Jar Binks. But while the Professor X of Origins is egregiously fake and synthetic, the Professor X of Logan is heartbreakingly real and devastatingly human.
In Logan, Charles Xavier is fragile and sad, a dying old man whose mortality is all too tangible and vivid. Here, Stewart is given an opportunity to give his second most beloved and iconic character (after the guy he plays in Blunt Talk, of course) an exit of Shakespearean depth. Mangold and Stewart make Professor X a sort of mutant King Lear, a god and a guru in his time facing down his imminent mortality and a life full of regrets.
The title character in Logan (that would be Wolverine) is similarly broken down and exhausted. The world weariness Jackman brings to the role has never been more haunting. And while Origins made the fatal mistake of shutting up the Merc with the Mouth, Logan introduces a mostly mute character in X-23 (Dafne Keen, in a star-making role), a little-girl mutant with very grown-up murdering skills whose sullen charisma comes damn close to stealing the best X-Men movie ever from Jackman and Stewart.
That is the genius of Logan. It is a movie about mutants, and the future, and superpowers, and Canadian alcoholics with giant razor murder-hands—yet it feels triumphantly, tragically, unmistakably human, especially in comparison to its own Origins. Thanks in no small part to Stewart, Jackman, and Mangold, Logan elevates comic-book brutality to the level of art. Origins, by contrast, barely qualifies as entertainment.
With Logan, Jackman and his collaborators walk away with the title of “most improved superhero trilogy ever.” But that’s at least partially because the fascinatingly, educationally terrible first entry set the bar so low and left so much room for improvement.
