Logan aka “Wolverine 3” aka “the last X-Men movie anyone anywhere will want to watch” is Hugh Jackman’s last ride as The Man With No Bones himself. How will this stack up to the X-Men days of our future and past? Breaking Hard Men protocol, I venture some solid prognostication on this in-development film, tentatively arguing this hot take: it could be good or it could be bad, for a variety of reasons. Those reasons are as follows.
GOOD
The movie is being directed by James Mangold, who directed The Wolverine. That movie was well-directed.
BAD
The movie is being written by David James Kelley, who has never written a feature film, and Michael Green, who has never written a feature film worth watching.
GOOD
Huge Jackman is very fun to watch as clawed superhero Wolverine Man and there’s no reason to think that will change. He never hit a Sean Connery/James Bond disdain for the character that made his career, and he still takes these movies seriously for some reason. He’s sure to bust out the classic line “hey bub” and show off abs so hard jet fuel itself could not melt them.
BAD
Rumor is the movie is based on the “Old Man Logan” storyline by Mark Millar, whose goal in life is to write comics exclusively for incel sociopaths. It’s dumb and boring, but more importantly, it sucks.
GOOD
“Old Man Logan” is basically unfilmable thanks to Capitalism, praise be Its name. The story is a big crossover event with guys like Red Skull, Mysterio, and The Hulk as the large bads. Like “Kingdom Come” was for DC, it’s a sprawling love letter to the Marvel Universe, but in this case the kind of love letter that contains photos of you taken without your knowledge and which is written in blood and semen. By Mark Millar.
Anyway, Fox doesn’t have the license to use any of those characters so it’s gonna be “based on” that storyline the same way Fargo was “based on” a true story.
BAD
Even a loose adaptation would mean we get a story that starts with Logan as a PTSD-ridden peacenik who doesn’t want to be a superhero anymore, and concludes with him learning to embrace the psychotic violence that fanboys crave. That was already the whole arc of the last Wolverine movie. And come to think of it, also the first one.
GOOD
Wolverine standing around being non-violent was great in X-Men: The Case of the Future Past, in which a time-traveling Logan experienced the Swinging Seventies as an Ebenezer Scrooge-style “time ghost,” only able to interact with the world by talking with his psychic friend Allard Xavier. It gave the other characters plenty of spotlight without having Wolverine, the Superman of the X-Men universe, solve all their problems for them. It made for a good movie that I remember very clearly.
BAD
This isn’t an X-Men movie, and the grand sum of Interesting Supporting Characters in Wolverine’s solo movies is zero. No Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen or Michael Fastbender or James McCoy or Famke Janssen or Anna Pacquin or Rebecca Romaine or Tyrion or Sansa or Frasier or the kid who plays Young Beast. Instead, make way for… I can’t even remember the names of any of the characters from The Wolverine. Snake Lady.
GOOD
No Jennifer Lawrence.
CONCLUSION
Logan might be good, but could also very well be bad.
With any luck, this being the last time we see John Logan on the silver screen, we might get a Furious 7 Paul Walker-style sendoff. Is it too much to hope for another it’s-lit-fam Wiz Khalifa/Charlie Puth collab? That would certainly push things into Very Good territory.
I really hope the movie is shot entirely in black-and-white like all the promo images.
Leave a Reply