The movie deserves credit for trying to scale the superhero genre down to bare emotions, but fails to deliver a great story.
Fans have been waiting to see an R-rated Wolverine movie ever since the first X-Men movie came out in 2000. And Logan does deliver on the mutant-on-bad-guy violence.
But it falls victim to lazy Hollywood—the belief that taking a hardened badass and making him take care of an innocent (or not-so-innocent) girl will create good drama automatically. But unlike The Professional and other films that have done it well, Logan breezes through the character development that made those film great. While some scenes are poignant, most of the movie hops along from cliche to cliche just to find excuses for its medium-budget action sequences.
And it didn’t help that I was watching the movie after it had already gotten a 93% on RottenTomatoes and earned over $600 million worldwide. I think if we’re being honest, half of each of those numbers are from the movie itself, and the other half just because everyone knew it was Hugh Jackman’s last run as Wolverine.
No one can deny that Jackman made Wolverine his own, and has done an amazing job defining and growing the character (despite how horrendous the first solo movie was). And each Wolverine solo movie is definitely better than the one before it. But this final movie in his Wolverine career was not nearly as good as his sendoff should have been. It was just “decent.”