Alright, Logan’s been out for a few weeks, let’s dig into this bad larry. Spoilers ahead.
If the box office receipts are to be believed, by now you have almost certainly seen Logan, which means you know that it does something almost-unprecedented for a film in this age of cinematic universes and multi-film sagas: it ends. Conclusively.
Yup, 17 years after he first popped the claws, Hugh Jackman’s James Howlett aka Logan aka Wolverine meets his end at the hands of his own souped up clone, X-24. Wolverine experiences a moment of peace and dies in the arms of his clone “daughter” Laura (Dafne Keen), after which she and her friends bury Logan in a quiet place deep in the forest on the Canadian border. A weeping Laura recites Alan Ladd’s final speech from the classic Western Shane (having watched the film earlier with Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, before he too got the shit murdered out of him by the Wolvie-clone), and turns the handmade cross over Logan’s grave into a X. Cue the waterworks from characters and audiences alike.
I’m going to criticize Logan in a second, but before I do I want to say, just so we’re clear, that criticizing a film does not preclude liking the film. I saw Logan twice, in IMAX, and thoroughly enjoyed it both times. It’s far and away the best of the X-Men films, and I truly and sincerely applaud Jackman, Stewart, co-writer/director James Mangold for using all of their clout and studio cache to swing hard for the fences. Logan feels unlike any other mainstream comic book film, and in moments you can feel it realizing its titanic ambitions.
But, and I gotta be honest here, the Shane stuff irritates the fuck out of me. Irritated me the first time I saw it. Irritated me the second time. Has continued to irritate me in the weeks since I saw Logan, a nagging little rejoinder to an excellent film.
Because let’s get one thing clear: I like Logan, but I fucking LOVE Shane. It’s not just one of the great Westerns, but one of the great American texts, full stop. A deeply human and humane exploration of the great Western myth, Shane is a landmark film in a number of ways, not least of all how director George Stevens used the seemingly simple story as a means to finally bring moral accountability to one of the most violent of film genres.
That film, of course, follows Alan Ladd’s Shane, a guilt-wracked gunslinger who wanders into a town where the local farmers are being bullied by a wicked cattle baron and his hired guns, led by the irreplaceable Jack Palance. Shane takes a shine to one local boy, Joey, even showing the kid how to wear a gunbelt and take aim with a pistol. When the kid’s mom (Jean Arthur) objects, Shane insists that a gun is just a tool, no more inherently good or evil than farming equipment.
As is the way of Westerns, Shane rides out into a final standoff in which he rids the town of the barons and gunslingers. Wounded, possibly fatally, he tells Joey to tell his mother that there are no more guns in the valley. As Joey cries for Shane to come back, a slumped-over Ladd vanishes into the horizon.
And this is where things start to go wrong with Logan. On the one hand, you can see exactly what Mangold and co-writers Scott Frank (why haven’t you watched The Loookout?) and Michael Green are playing at. With Logan, all the pain and loss that is so quickly brushed aside in the frenetic action of a PG-13 superhero film are brought back at full force. It’s not just the scars that crisscross Jackman’s torso, or the way his hand shakes and voice breaks, but in the hollow, exhausted look in his eyes from the first scene on. Violence has sapped away Wolverine’ soul, and with his heroic death he is able to offer Laura and her fellow mutant children a clean slate and a hope for a peaceful life.
But tell me this: If Logan so despises the violence that defines his life, then why does Logan fucking LOVE violence so much?
Logan takes as much glee out of headstabs as it does in the word “fuck,” gleefully slinging both around like a kid with a new toy at Christmas. After 17 years of seeing berserker mode watered down by the demands of a family audience, it was with palpable glee that fans flocked to screens to watch limbs be severed and faces be slashed, all in unflinching detail. One setpiece even involves Logan cutting his way through a room full of hitmen while everyone suffers from Professor X-induced slow motion, so you get to see the claws slide oh-so-slowly into the skulls of anonymous henchmen and pop out the other side in pornographic detail.
And the problem is compounded by the presence of Laura, X-23, a silent little girl who shreds a small army of mercenaries and cyborgs that come after her. A whirling dervish of pint-sized destruction, Laura flips and spins and flies through the air, spurring gasps and applause and laughter from audience members as she decapitates and dismembers her foes. It’s shocking, but it’s shocking in a way that provokes glee and applause, the thrills augmented by the film’s kinetic camera work and rapid editing.
Compare this to Shane (which, to be clear, Logan all-but forces you to do by having the characters watch and then quote Shane). The gunshots in Shane strike like cannon blasts, a detail emphasized by Stevens’ sound design. When innocent and guilty man alike are struck by bullets, they don’t topple gently to the ground as they had in Westerns past, but instead fly backwards into the ground where they hit hard and lay still.
As documented in Mark Harris’ phenomenal book, Five Came Back, Stevens gave up a lucrative career making zany comedies, romances, and adventure pictures like Gunga Din to head up a film unit for World War II. His unit was there at D-Day, and they were there at the liberation of the camps at Dachau. Footage that Stevens and his team took was later used at the Nuremberg trials.
When George Stevens made a film condemning violence, you better believe that every fucking frame of that film is condemning that violence, no ifs ands or buts.
And maybe it’s wrong to hold a comic book film to that kind of standard, but that is the bed you make when you invoke one film to underline the themes of your own. Invoking Shane only reiterates that for all the fucks, all the tits, and all the gore, Logan is still very much kids’ stuff, playing at nuance without earning it, proudly extolling its own darkness without owning the ramifications of what it is dramatizing.
There is one scene where Logan truly becomes the kind of film it purports to be. It’s when X-24, the evil clone of Wolverine, rampages through a farmhouse and slaughters Professor X and the family that was hosting our heroes. For that stretch of film, from the bloodbath through X’s funeral, you can see a comic book film that truly reckons with the cost of a violent life, with the miserable toll of death and loss on even the noblest of spirits.
And then it’s time for the little girl to stab some more people.