'Logan' Is Fashioned As A Western Out To Turn Fanboy Devotion Into Real Emotion

logan

Have you seen Shane? James Mangold really hopes you’ve seen Shane. But, if you haven’t seen Shane, don’t worry, he’s going to show you Shane. 

Mangold is enough of a fan of old Westerns to have taken the clout he earned with his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk The Line, and used it to remake 3:10 To Yuma. After a disastrous detour into Tom Cruise motorcycle-riding vanity with Knight & Day, Mangold —in a career of touring through genres— signed up to direct Hugh Jackman in the second stand-alone Wolverine movie, uninspiringly titled The Wolverine. 

In that film, the Logan-goes-to-Japan set up let Mangold lean on the tropes and samurai and yakuza movies, but it was an approach that only lasted two acts; the artful mise-en-scène and careful character-work nuked with a seemingly-studio-mandated big-superhero-CGI-spectacular film. Where, last time, he was just director-for-hire, with Logan Mangold got to build the film from the ground up, authoring the screenplay, and fulfilling Jackman’s desire to make one final film as the character he’s spent 17 years playing. 

And, so, Mangold fashions Logan as a Western. It finds —in a rarely futuristic 2029— its titular mutant old, broken down, drunk. He ekes out an anonymous living as a limo driver in El Paso, before retreating to a disused industrial site across the border, where he’s holed up with the geriatric Professor X (Sir Patrick Stewart, fresh off crushing Green Room), whose degenerative brain condition means that his all-powerful telepathic capabilities have effectively turned into a misfiring weapon, liable to accidentally detonate at any moment. He’s aided by the albino tracker Caliban (Ricky Gervais off-sider Stephen Merchant, thankfully shtick-free), who’s wryly accepted indentured servitude as a kind of live-in nurse/housewife. 

Comic-book movies are fond of depicting the end of the world (averted, always), but here’s a film that opens at the ends of the Earth. But no mutant can hide, even when dwelling in the sun-blasted, dustbowl wilderness of an unforgiving Mexico. So, soon enough, our rag-tag family are forced to protect a Very Special Little Girl (Dafne Keene) from the evil forces of gold-toothed, scenery-chewing, ex-military mercenary Boyd Holbrook, and playing-God sciencey villain Richard E. Grant. If you’ve ever wanted to see a generic good-guys-escape-in-a-car-being-sprayed-by-automatic-weaponfire, only with a limo, then Logan delivers the goods; this car-chase begetting a road-movie overland, through the heartland, from Texas to North Dakota. 

As Logan rolls on, we learn our tyke ain’t no naïf. Instead, with shades of Stranger Things, she’s revealed to be the spawn of Wolverine’s DNA, reared in a shadowy research facility as weapon. And, thus, Logan —like Jack Reacher: Never Go Back— becomes a film in which a lone rogue meets the kid he never knew he had, and is forced to care about something other than himself. This means there’s more daddy/daughter bonding through the prism of an action-movie; though the action of Logan plays pulpier, the blood sprays indebted to samurai movies and splatter horror. Jackman and Keene grow closer by slitting, slicing, spearing, skewering, decapitating, gutting, gouging, and goring an endless host of anonymous muscle-bound stooges; this ultraviolence having a nasty, bloody, visceral quality at odds with the usual stylised lightness of comic-book movies. 

This means that the old cliché of comic-book reimaginings —‘gritty’— is on full display. Logan is dour and dusty, filled with death, loss, heaviness. Jackman and Stewart don’t just play aging, faltering super-heroes, but men staring mortality in the face. And, that’s where Shane comes in. When our rag-tag family holes up in a casino hotel, Stewart and Keene —with shades of Uma Thurman and Perla Haney-Jardine in Kill Bill: Volume 2— sit down to watch the classic Western in a hat-tipping act of homage. 

Mangold takes things further, evoking Shane’s drama in his own story, in a sequence in which Jackman helps —well, at least for a moment— a local farming family to stand up to the standover rogues working for the modern-day robber-baron (here, a corporate soft-drink conglomerate turning farmland into a grand corn-syrup operation). And, then, at the flick’s end, Mangold lifts a key speech from Shane wholesale; Logan, here, the titular wanderer who helped a kid learn how to stand up to the man. 

It seems like almost a postmodernist gesture, but, for Mangold, it’s evoking a classic finale, a work of timeless genre sentimentality. But, its second-hand sentiments seem symbolic of the Logan’s second-rate emotions; the way inspiring speeches with dying breaths, ginned-up score, and Johnny Cash ballads are used to curry feeling. Logan is out to turn fanboy devotion into real emotion; authoring a valentine to mortality for those who, like the titular hero, have aged. But, to really feel those feels, you would’ve have to have identified with the cigar-chomping, wise-cracking, indestructible dickwad of yore in the first place.

miss sloane

Here’s Jessica Chastain: cold-hearted and steely-eyed and sharply-spoken; the ballsiest lobbyist on the Washington hill, master of the dark arts of persuasion and manipulation, superstar of “the most morally bankrupt profession since faith healing”. Her character is commanding, domineering, indubitable, and so is the performance: Chastain submitting A+ work in an Oscarbait B-movie. Jonathan Perera’s Sorkinist fable of corporate-political gamesmanship and post-truth posturing is full of verbal froth and bubble, piss and vinegar, but ultimately its walk-and-talks head in a generic direction: Miss Sloane a truth-to-power thriller whose wild twist ending plays like fantasy-fulfilment. 

Chastain may be the most ruthless wolf in the pack, but she’s secretly a lobbyist with a weak-spot: she’s ideologically opposed to America’s gun culture. So, she ditches her old job working for old white men —at a firm where Michael Stuhlbarg completes his smug-workplace-dick 2016 trifecta, after Arrival and Doctor Strange— and goes veritably Brockovichian, toiling for a rag-tag leftie outfit out to take on the most powerful mob in town: the gun lobby. It’s David vs Goliath, and those who think Chastain has no chance in winning need only know this isn’t Based On A True Story; and, thus, evil can be overcome by a fiery redhead always thinking two moves ahead. 

For all its cod Sorkinism, Perera’s screenplay is brisk, snappy, sassy; and the direction, by John Madden, follows suit. Madden’s coming off the glorified cinematic vacation of making back-to-back Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, and Miss Sloane marks an aboutface: its DC offices and political back-rooms (and, yes, there’s a scene in an underground parking garage) shot in the coolest, coldest of colours; the cute cross-cutting between Chastain on framing-narrative trial and Chastain hard at passing-of-time-montage work creating real momentum and energy. This builds to a grandstanding courtroom showdown —and revelation— that’s cathartic and pleasingly-wacky, but ultimately unsatisfying. At the epoch of Trumpism, seeing an imaginary on-screen victory for human values over corporate might feels like the coldest of comfort.