The premise sounded cool to me. I never read comic books (I was a huge baseball card nerd) but I remember being a kid and seeing issues like "Death in the Family," which without bothering to look up, I remember as like Batman or Robin died and I recall an illustration of a bunch of people in black at a funeral. There were also Superman comics I remember with the S logo dripping blood. Maybe what caught my attention were the attempts to take these classic superheroes into darker dramatic territory.
Also lately I've avoided superhero movies but in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, Olivier Assayas) when the Kristen Stewart, whom I've recently been smitten with as the coolest actress working, character sticks up for the virtues of the contemporary superhero genre movies she effectively convinced me in real life that I owe them more of my time.
Logan (2017, James Mangold) is a road movie and a movie about family and fits in the superhero genre. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is the timeless icon of animal aggression. And Logan heavily plays up the fish out of water aspects of his plight starting with the opening sequence where he must defend himself against some carjacker cholos. The scene is ultraviolent, but also sees Wolverine in less than formidable condition for battle physically.
Logan is about a once great warrior dying, on the run, hunted like an animal. Professor X is having seizures with him and they're both like dealing with mortality. And I feel like the dark tone delivers what I'd went in there searching for. Bleak.
But it is a superhero movie and the only drawbacks were like really I'm fucking watching Wolverine as an old man wearing glasses and mostly all he's doing is texting and messing around on his smartphone? And X-24 because I realized he's a newer version of Wolverine, developed through technology for evil with maximum effectiveness and unlike his predecessor is a sociopath, and his bounty is a child Wolverine is guarding so it hit me--he's T1000?! But I don't know my comics so maybe this was all written before the Schwarzenegger movie. Also, I love Shane (1953, George Stevens), hell it's the first Western I ever saw and has always been so important to my appreciation of the genre's classic Hollywood period but, while Shane's themes are wonderful as overlays with Logan, at the very end of the movie when LAURA quotes those long passages I was stunned with distaste. First of all she just saw it once, while Professor X and Wolverine were in a yelling argument right in the middle of it, and we're expected to believe she memorized a short paragraph of dialogue verbatim?
Laura is fun. She devours that dinner like a pig, she's fierce, cute, and Mexican! Laura is the vehicle that drives the pathos of the family drama. And like NEGASONIC TEENAGE WARHEAD, I am a sucker for the gag with the quiet cute little girl who is capable of mass destruction, gets me every time. The ending really works. Maybe because I'm also a huge fan of the X-Men kids, who are all also Mexican!
And in the best possible ways Logan feels like a comic book. So I can't really say that I was let down or anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment