02/2017 Logan (2017)

A film that pretends to be a reflective, sombre study of how time catches up with us all, no matter how resillient you may be to its effects.

Although it's still mostly about car chases and genetically engineered soldiers with robot hands.

It also feels like it's too little, too late. The first two X Men films were cracking good fun and felt like something different. However their success is, at least in sizeable part, responsible for the saturation, the absolute avalanche, of increasingly tedious, bland, homogenised and plain boring superhero films that, along with the now yearly Star Wars flick, seem to utterly dominate and suffocate popular cinema.

If there had been a gap between the first two films and this one, it could well have made it into my, I dunno, top 200 films?

It would have had a much more potent impact, the story of how even the strongest of people weaken with age, both physically and in the force of their convictions, if we had seen the young and heroic Wolverine saving the day then, two decades later the battered, scarred shell he'd become.

That is of course wishful thinking when talking about films, or most things in this world, when the reality is that anything that can be commodotized, exploited, exposed and profited from will be commercially wanked to death ensuring that every last drop of cash has been squeezed from our collective cock.

So, yeah, it is good, we did like it. It does have a little of the tonal rawness such a film deserves, the performances are all excellent. It even, early on in the film, flirts with making a few political statements, in that spineless, Hollywood kinda way. The action scenes are done well although there isn't enough of them (I know that sounds a little contradictory, but when all's done, you want an angry Wolverine ripping the fuck out of the bad guys!), there's some decent chuckles and it's visually spot-on...

But it's too tarnished by its association with the films before it.

Probably my favourite thing about this film is that it lead Charlie Brooker to describe Wolverine as "looking like a cross between Noddy Holder and a cutlery drawer".