Logan (2017)

Rezension

Mar 5

The year is 2029. There are hardly any mutants left. The few survivors live in hiding, on the fringes of society. America is dominated by corporations and their private armies. The former X-Men Logan (Hugh Jackman) has grown old. His self-healing powers are waning. Together with the mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant), they take care of Processor X (Patrick Stewart), who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Together, the trio lives in an abandoned factory on the U.S. border with Mexico, which is now 'protected' by Trump's wall. He keeps his friends and himself afloat with a job as a limousine chauffeur. When the Mexican nurse Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) asks him to bring the girl Laura (Dafoe Keen) and her to North Dakota, Logan becomes the focus of the mutant hunter Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), who has sinister plans for the girl Laura and her special abilities ...

'A little piece of you - The little peace in me - Will die (This is not a miracle) - For this is not America' goes David Bowie's 'This Is Not America'.The sad truth of James Mangold's 'Logan' is that our world is currently moving in exactly the direction shown by the nightmarish America in the film. Autonomous robotic vehicles traverse the highways or the endless row of fields of genetically engineered wheat. The neoliberal nightmare of the unleashed market rules the land. The poor and marginalized of society (mutants included) must crawl to its edges to survive, or escape to the politically safer Canada. A film could not be more topical. The script for Logan was written before the election of Donald Trump as US president.

'Logan' is basically a western that happens to be set in the milieu of the superhero movie. Hugh Jackman plays the aging Logan like Gary Cooper plays the sheriff in Fred Zinneman's 'High Noon'.He just wants his peace and somehow survive. But even for a retired superhero, there's no right living in the wrong. He may not be able to free America from its neoliberal grip, but he can make sure that the next generation of mutants gets a chance to take up the fight again. 'Logan' makes a case for being a good guy. Each of the morally upstanding characters in the film are, not coincidentally, representatives of minorities. Right-wing, old white men run the country. And Logan kicks their butts, albeit with increasing effort, or rams his adamantium claws into their hollow skulls, respectively. Violence is never without consequence in this - thank 'Deadpool' - film freed from the constraints of the PG-13 children's movie. But 'Logan' doesn't degenerate into a slaughter. The use of violence always has fatal consequences. And this logic is relentlessly explored in 'Logan'. The film is not a swan song to the superhero genre (while it literally carries the X-films series to the grave), but shows where this genre can develop, if the topics it deals with are taken out of the children's room and coupled with current social developments.

Mangold directs the film laconic and grounded. There is already talk that the film will hit theaters again in a black-and-white version. Therefore, I have already edited the stills for this review to that effect. The impact of the film - and its closeness to the Western genre - could certainly be enhanced by such an edit. The film is overlong, but not because it is crammed with exuberant CGI fireworks, but because the film takes its time with its characters and plot. The moral decay of American society here acts as a grim reminder to all who desperately want to see the world and its system burn. For it is always the weakest and most helpless in society who pay for the abandonment of democracy and public spirit with pain and death. And as the film shows, you can very quickly belong to this group ...