Although the opening scene is pretty cool, with Logan defending his limo from a gang of thieves, this movie still gets off to a depressing start as Logan is getting old, struggling to move around and even bring his claws out, and is babysitting Professor X who’s gone a bit mad and feels trapped and keeps getting pinned down and put to sleep with injections. There are signs of something a little more interesting brewing, but it takes a while to come round.
A little over 20 minutes in, and finally the plot is heading somewhere interesting.
This vibe of mixing the odd cool scene with an excessive amount of long slow gritty depressing patches generally defines this movie. It could easily be developed and condensed into a more concise, exciting movie for action hero movie fans – as it stands, it’s a bit lost between genres.
It takes until 2 hours in – when there’s less than 20 minutes left of the movie (including time for closing credits), for Logan to actually start looking like a serious force to be reckoned with, no longer acting crippled by his old age and injuries, due to the fact he’s just taken a dangerously high amount of repair serum. This scene resembles a scene near the end of the movie Blade, when Blade drank the blood of his doctor girlfriend, after escaping and needing to bring himself back to good health fast. In both cases the main protagonist became a temporarily super-charged version of their former self, at a time when they were disabled by their condition but needed to put up a good fight asap. Blade also took a serum throughout his movie, but that was a weak alternative to the real blood he drank before the final battle.
Hugh Jackman stars in this movie as both Logan (the main protagonist) and X-24 (the final boss antagonist, who looks just like Logan but is cleaner shaven).
Charles Xavier is played by Patrick Stewart – he dies half way through the movie – killed by X-24.
Laura is played by Dafne Keen – she’s a child who has the same abilities as Logan and X-24 (long claws and quick healing).
What’s next?
Next up – if you’re following the X-Men movie saga in order of release date, including all the spin-offs that fall within its cinematic universe such as the Wolverine trilogy and the Deadpool movies – next up is Dark Phoenix (2019) which has a lot in common with Captain Marvel which was released in the same year, except Dark Phoenix falls within the X-Men universe and Captain Marvel falls within the Avengers universe (commonly called the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) but I’m not a fan of that name since both the X-Men universe and the Avengers universe are based on Marvel Comics). We’ve already seen the power of Jean Grey in X-Men Apocalypse (2016) as well as other X-Men movies prior to that where Jean Grey was played by a different actress (Famke Janssen), but none of those movies were really dedicated to her like Dark Phoenix is, so if you’re a fan of the Jean Grey character, especially the version played by Sophie Turner from X-Men: Apocalypse, be sure to check out the Dark Phoenix movie next, although it’s not nearly as good as X-Men: Apocalypse in my opinion.