The well-used X-Men theme of good people caught up in a bad world is treated with grit, dirt and no polish in the latest X-Men movie, Logan.

Theme

Previous X-Men movies have put mutants, who are otherwise human in quite a few respects, as outsiders in a world that discriminates against them.

The good mutants get tarred with the same brush as the dangerous mutants. The public weren’t ready for the mutant arrival onto the world scene.

Wolverine is a mutant. Logan is dedicated to him and Hugh Jackman’s exit from the X-Men film series.

Logan aka Wolverine, played by Jackman, is good hearted, though he has to fight for survival right through with fists and claws. It seems that those who discriminate and the users—the users being the scientists who use mutant genetics for their own ends—will wind up with a fight back. No one who is “different” wants to be singled out or used.

Logan aka Wolverine has always been a disenfranchised, lonely and extraordinary character,particularly in this new film.

(There have been two other Wolverine movies and several X-Men movies featuring the character.)

In the new film, it’s obvious that life is hard for him, life’s unfair, he may or may not die, and religion and spirituality or God has little or no meaning in the world. Life for him is “stuck in the middle”. There seems no way out. He doesn’t get a break. If Logan was a story about something of God’s world, then God loves Logan, too, though that message doesn’t come through.

Violent

This film about him takes a more Deadpool-ish approach to exploring his angst and torment, though without any of the sarcastic humor of Deadpool, but with the same R-rated rampage.

Logan is intense rather than the amusing. The severely clawed one is in quite a bit of a screwed up mission with Charles Xavier in wheelchair and a mutant girl in tow to get to “Eden”, while escaping the clutches of some new evil characters hunting down the girl.

The group after the girl is Transigen and they have been harvesting children from the DNA of mutants like Logan. But some children escaped, including the girl.

Transigen’s security chief leads the Reavers in a full-on chase down of the young ones.

Needless to say, there’s a fight back, including the combat skills of the girl, who has powers beyond her age. Logan decapitates and thrusts his enemies without going as far as disemboweling.

Eden is the safe haven the girl is looking for, where the other children are, before crossing the Canadian / American border, to safety.

As a warning, the film is intense and graphically violent, too much so for my liking.

Logan is not the kind of future world we envisage—which is the point. Let’s not go there, to the violence, and the extremes of genetic engineering and the personal passions this science may inflame.