Logan

Logan is the first film in this genre where the powers are the problem, not the solution. Wolverine’s healing factor, for two decades a punchline about how little the character has to fear, is here failing him in real time. He drinks to blunt the pain of a body that no longer heals cleanly. The adamantium is poisoning him from the inside. James Mangold doesn’t stage this as tragedy-with-a-cape; he stages it as a western, and the choice is the whole argument. Westerns are about men who’ve outlived their usefulness to the frontier that made them. Wolverine has outlived his.

The Western Underneath

The genre furniture is everywhere and it’s not decorative. There’s a literal screening of Shane in the film, which is about as unsubtle as a homage gets, but it earns the nod — Logan’s arc is Shane’s arc, the gunfighter dragged into one last job he’s too broken and too reluctant to do well. The landscape is flat, sunblasted, unglamorous. Nobody’s flying over a city. The action, when it comes, is brutal and close and clearly costs the people doing it something, which is rare enough in this genre to be worth flagging on its own.

Powers as a Liability, Not a License

What makes this a must-watch rather than just a good western with claws is the specific work it does on care. Logan is functionally a carer for Charles Xavier, whose mind — the most powerful weapon either of them has ever had — is deteriorating into something that endangers everyone near him. That’s the film’s real subject: what it costs to look after someone whose gifts have become dangerous to them and to you, and what it costs the carer, who is himself falling apart. Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart play this like it’s a two-hander stage piece that occasionally has a car chase in it, and it’s the best either of them has been in these roles.

Who It’s For, and the Reservation

This is for anyone who thinks the genre’s default mode — stakes escalating to planetary, threat becoming abstract — has become a dead end. It’s spoiler-light to talk around, but the plot does eventually widen out to include a corporate-conspiracy strand that’s the weakest part of the film. It’s serviceable, it moves things along, but it’s noticeably thinner than the character work around it, and the villain doesn’t get the interiority the leads do. That’s the honest caveat: this is a film that’s better at people than at plot. If you go in wanting a tight thriller mechanism, you’ll notice the seams. If you go in for two ageing men trying to look after each other properly for the first time, the seams won’t matter much.