"Logan": one-paragraph review

"Logan," directed by James Mangold and starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Eriq La Salle, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, and Richard E. Grant, is a 2017 film marketed as the "final outing" for the Wolverine character. Taking place in 2029, "Logan" is a bleak, almost post-apocalyptic story in which most of the mutants we know and love are dead. Logan himself is hiding out at the US/Mexico border with a 90-year-old Charles Xavier, the powerful psychic mutant who founded the X-Men and is now suffering from both Alzheimer's and ALS. This makes him prone to mental fits that manifest as psionic assaults on everyone around him, so Logan keeps him drugged up and docile most of the time. Into Logan's life comes tiny little Laura, a mutant who is essentially a product of Logan's DNA. Xavier encourages Logan to think of her as his daughter and to take her north to safety. Much of the film is a road movie as Logan, Laura, and Charles drive north, chased by the Reavers who are in the service of Dr. Xander Rice, who has been eliminating old-guard mutants and creating new ones that he aims to control. Hugh Jackman gives a great performance as a broken Wolverine; the character's healing factor is nearly spent, so Jackman spends most of the movie looking scarred, coughing, limping, and growling at Charles Xavier. Dafne Keen gives a spitfire performance that will remind some of young Chloë Grace Moretz in "Kick-Ass." The girl's got talent. Patrick Stewart, like his buddy Ian McKellen in "Mr. Holmes," gets to play a nonagenarian, and he does it with sentiment and wry humor. The plot moves along at a deliberate pace; there's plenty of action and "Deadpool"-level gore, but this is balanced out with a series of quiet moments. And while I was left with many technical questions, I found the overall story to be worthwhile—a good conclusion for a memorable character that Hugh Jackman has owned and inhabited for nearly two decades. Certainly, this is the best of all the Wolverine-centered films, and it may be the best of all the X-Men films in terms of how it emphasizes familial togetherness in the face of a cruel and pitiless world. Oh, yes: I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a spoiler, but don't stick around for end-credit scenes: there are none. The lack of such scenes reminded me, for some reason, of the "silent clock" in "24."