Logan Review

Mangold makes a western and barely bothers to disguise it. The year is 2029, mutants are gone, and Logan drives a limousine along the border while the healing that defined him has stopped working, which lets Hugh Jackman play exhaustion after seventeen years of playing rage. Patrick Stewart is the shock. Xavier now has a degenerating brain, and his seizures freeze everyone within a hundred yards, so the most powerful mind on earth becomes a weapon nobody can switch off.

Dafne Keen does most of her work in silence and is never once cute. John Mathieson shoots dust, motels and cornfields, and Mangold quotes Shane on a hotel television and then again over a grave, which ought to be too much and somehow is not. The farmhouse dinner sequence is where the ending gets earned. What drags it down is the studio machinery it could not shed: X-24 is a doppelganger with no idea attached to it, and the corporate villain is a smirk with a robot hand. Everything human here is excellent.