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Kong: Skull Island (2017; Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts)

In some ways, Kong: Skull Island is a departure from the standard-bearing films telling the semi-allegorical cinematic myth of the giant gorilla, torn from the hidden jungle island home where he rules as a god-like monarch and destroyed by an arrogant techno-capitalist empire. This Kong physically dwarfs previous iterations (I’d estimate that he’s 3 to 5 times larger than the ape from Peter Jackson’s King Kong), he never leaves his island realm and does not meet his doom at the hands of military aircraft while perched atop a Manhattan skyscraper (not really a spoiler, though others may follow), and doesn’t really have a female blond-haired American object of unrequitable affection. Indeed, Skull Island leaves out almost any hint of the unruly, often troubling sexual and racial subtexts that defined the ideological implications of prior pictures (and which I’ve written about in great detail in the past, in a four–part PopMatters feature).

In many other ways, however, Skull Island sees the Kong franchise (as Legendary Pictures is now considering it, alongside and eventually crossing over with its Godzilla films in a so-called “MonsterVerse” movie series) returning to its very oldest roots. As my essays discussed, Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s original 1933 King Kong was essentially a thrilling potboiler of a B-movie whose political subtexts were established deep in its foundations and only rarely rose to the surface. Subsequent versions of the Kong narrative (John Guillermin’s in 1976, Jackson’s in 2005) layered on ideological implications and associations that clustered around the figure of Kong and reflected shifting political and social attitudes to what the ape and its destruction might be seen to represent: the struggle of African-Americans from slavery through Jim Crow and segregation to civil rights and beyond, progressing views of sexuality, and, more than anything, the nature of American global power and the sliding understanding of its moral dimensions. Kong was brought low by that power, a victim of its pitiless, prejudiced imperatives, and the 1976 and 2005 films mourned the great ape as a martyr (as the popular 1960s graffiti declaimed: “King Kong Died for Our Sins”). To be succinct, the symbolic trajectory of Kong ran from spectacle to elegy.

Cooper’s Kong is more than anything an exciting adventure movie that celebrates the waxing might of American capitalist imperialism and its triumph over primitive brutality, as expressed through Cooper’s favoured forms of projecting that power: motion pictures and air power (in addition to his moviemaking, Cooper flew fighter biplanes in World War I and the Polish-Soviet War and commanded the Allied air defense of China in World War II). Kong: Skull Island is a confident, intoxicating, beautiful reconstitution of pure old-school popcorn spectacle in the 1933 Kong‘s long-shadowed tradition, but it’s also the film series’ firmest repudiation yet of the conservative Cooper’s patriotic myth of rising American glory. Set in 1973, the film compellingly invokes the Vietnam War from which American troops were being withdrawn, as well as the zeitgeist films about the conflict that fed into Americans’ roiling doubts about their nation’s greatness and moral rectitude (Apocalypse Now, certainly, but Platoon and others too). Despite this, Skull Island is definitely the shallowest Kong film since the original, the most invested in superficial visceral sensation.

But how superficial is that sensation, really, when it’s quite this sensational? Skull Island, helmed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, is a ravishing stunner of an action-adventure blockbuster, bursting with imagination and clever visual designs and jaw-dropping epic scale. The astounding vision of this otherwise frothy distraction hits home with maximal impact in the great ape’s iconic full reveal, during a calamitous assault on a squadron of Vietnam-seasoned helicopters invading his island kingdom. There’s a dizzy, violently giddy delight to this sequence that, even with plenty of notably fun action beats to come, is singular and memorable. Vogt-Roberts’ direction is positively drunk on the inspired glory on his imagery here, and you can’t wait to tip back your glass until you’re under the table with him.

There’s some rote introduction and exposition to get through before this launch pad moment, mind you. Skull Island‘s opening act is structured in the precise same manner as previous Kong movies (though more efficiently than Jackson’s divisive, protracted voyage on the Venture), with a determined rogue dreamer talking up an expedition to a tantalizing, mysterious unexplored island and leading a team into the uncharted unknown, about which he usually knows more than he lets on. This time, the Carl Denham figure (based in the original film on Cooper himself, who made daring documentaries in exotic locales during the 1920s) is government official Bill Randa (John Goodman), who convinces a U.S. Senator (Richard Jenkins) to allow him and his Yale-graduate geologist protégé Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) to join a private mapping voyage to a skull-shaped island recently spotted by satellites in the South Pacific.

Expecting to encounter something worth protecting against, he enlists a military escort in the form of the aforementioned air cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s reluctant to leave the war in Vietnam behind and is eager for renewed action. Randa also hires former British S.A.S. soldier James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) as a hunter-tracker (though he doesn’t say what he intends Conrad to hunt and track), and neither he nor Packard elect to turn away award-winning anti-war photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), who gains credentials to cover the expedition in the hopes of exposing its dark secrets.

Split up and consigned to travel on foot by Kong’s furious decimation of their seismic-depth-charge-dropping choppers, this ragtag squad encounters a fantastic and often lethal variety of superfauna as they make for a scheduled three-days-hence rendezvous point on the island’s north shore that is their only ticket off this hellish place. Believed to have alighted on the island via thermal vents which connect to vast, unexplored subterranean worlds, these animals are often enormous and sometimes more wondrous than deadly. They have run-ins with a mega-spider with viciously sharp legs camouflaged amidst a bamboo forest; a docile, massively humped swamp-dwelling water buffalo; a giant squid which Kong dispatches and then snacks on; nasty flocks of ravenous pterosaur-like predator birds; a sort of towering stick-insect disguised as a fallen log; and, most dangerously, razor-toothed carnivorous dual-armed lizards known as skullcrawlers. Emerging from the vents to maraud through the island ecosystem, the skullcrawlers are only kept at bay by Kong, who kills the younger ones before they can grow too large for him to handle.

The source for much of this island lore is a stranded World War II pilot, Lt. Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly). Seen crash-landing on the island along with a Japanese fighter-pilot antagonist in the movie’s cold open, Marlow has survived for nearly 30 years there and developed a knowledge of the place as well as more than a mild eccentricity. He dwells with the island’s native human inhabitants, mute grid-painted indigenes that he calls Iwi (a term for a community of Maori, so I suppose they’re Polynesian in origin) who view Kong as a god-like protector and who dwell behind a tall wooden wall to keep out the things nastier than the ape. In the highly fraught history of Skull Island natives, the depiction can be said to have progressed to the level of noble savage, which is certainly preferable to the racist stereotypes of prior movies but still insufficient. Conrad, Weaver, and their group fall in with Marlow and the Iwi, and realize that contrary to Packard’s single-minded rules of engagement thinking and drive to avenge his dead soldiers, Kong is not their real enemy and may indeed prove to be an ally.

While Kong: Skull Island is generally glorious entertainment, the praise does need to be tempered a tad. The script (by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connolly) pauses too often to remind the audience of the plot goals (find lost soldiers and armaments, obtain proof of the island’s fantastical monsters, reach the rescue site in time) and driving character motivations. While some key characters are well-enough fleshed-out (Reilly’s scene-stealing Marlow gets plentiful backstory, an endearing emotional core, and even a satisfying credits coda) and others work decently in broad strokes (Shea Whigham as a cynically bemused Captain and Toby Kebbell as a Southern Major give you all you need to know about them in limited beats), others still want for added depth. Hiddleston’s Conrad, putatively the male lead, seems to be missing important development beats, and mostly stalks through the undergrowth with gun in hand, urging the others on and discouraging Packard’s single-minded revenge mission against Kong. He is given one showpiece action moment, but it’s an odd one, donning a gas mask to stride balletically through a green toxic cloud slicing purple-blooded pterosaurs in half with a samurai sword.

Larson doesn’t get too much development either (though between her and Hiddleston, both clad in skin-tight undershirts in the sweltering jungle, there is plenty of corporeal aesthetic interest for voyeurs of any orientation), but her capable and compassionate photojournalist can fully take care of herself and even displays some ingenuity in the heat of battle with the skullcrawlers. As the sole flaxen-haired white woman among the party (Jing Tian is the only other woman, as a Chinese biologist), Larson’s Mason Weaver would be the film’s obvious Ann Darrow proxy as the focus of Kong’s yearning affections. Skull Island doesn’t go there nearly at all, though: she and Kong share a moment of empathy over a nature-lover’s protective instinct, and his protection of her figures centrally in the climatic moments of Kong’s closing dust-up with the alpha skullcrawler, but neither the lascivious desire of the earlier Kong/Ann relationships nor the tragic romance of Jackson’s film enter into the picture.

Instead, the voyeurism is turned the other way: Weaver’s 1970s vintage still camera is often the filter for the human gaze viewing and assessing Kong’s world. Additionally, Cooper’s dominant composition of Kong’s fights, with gigantic beasts filling the frame locked in mortal combat while puny human spectators observe from the corner edge of the foreground, is repeated on a few occasions by Vogt-Roberts, re-emphasizing the voyeuristic impression.

This towering Kong is realistically and often thoughtfully rendered, though not transcendingly so. Played via motion-capture by Terry Notary (his heavy gait is recognizable to an eye which has beheld hours of his behind-the-scenes DVD footage on The Hobbit films), Kong doesn’t have the wounded, lonely soul of a grizzled aesthete as he was played by Notary’s mo-cap mentor Andy Serkis in Jackson’s film, but he is given a brief beat of hesitant wonder at a dazzling nighttime aurora australis display. Without romantic facets and no evocation of what has been critically understood as Kong’s African-American symbolic dimensions, however, this is Kong as a nearly pure movie monster, closer to the proud but inscrutable Godzilla than to the sympathetic cousin to humanity and tragic reflection of its flaws that comes through even in Cooper’s film.

This leaves only the questioning depiction of American power standing among the text’s standard political metaphors, and Skull Island gladly provides that. It very purposely and directly invokes the recognizable iconography and sensory detail of Vietnam movies, from its sweaty jungles to the alternating terror and fleeting comradery of green-clad GIs to the carpet-bombing period rock n’ roll soundtrack. There’s even a river voyage on a rickety boat made of salvaged plane parts, and the Apocalypse Now associations were made very literal in the parodic movie poster to the right. Skull Island doesn’t exactly dwell on its ideological message, but is quite clear in its preference for cooperation and understanding in lieu of the self-interested imperialistic realpolitik which drove the disastrous folly of the bloodbath in Indochina.

The screenplay namechecks Apocalypse Now‘s anti-colonialist literary source Heart of Darkness (directly referenced and even quoted, though not unproblematically, in Jackson’s King Kong) through the names of Hiddleston and Reilly’s characters, but digs further into the literary canon for a metaphoric carrier for its broad critique of arrogant American imperial power. As the helicopter squadron flies through the storm-front ringing the island, Col. Packard (in fine Sam Jackson style) relates the Greek myth of Icarus, whose wings of wax forged by a god allowed him to fly but who plunged to earth when he flew too close to the sun and the wings melted. A classical parable of warning against hubristic ambition, the myth is visually recreated in the very first shot of the film, the silhouette of a man (the young Marlow during WWII, as it turns out) falling from above against the hot sphere of the sun.

Packard brushes aside this ancient caution with brash techno-military confidence: the U.S. Army gave his choppers wings of Pennsylvania steel, so he fears no enemy, god or otherwise. Packard refuses to accept that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War; they “abandoned” it, he says, and he refuses to cut and run against Kong in the same way. Skull Island is a new theatre in which he can wage a winning campaign to make up for the dishonour of the Vietnam withdrawal. That the civilians around him, and even his own troops, come to view his insistence on this mission as obsessive madness reflects popular disdain for American global militarism that, despite this widespread hostility, continues to be propagated and perpetuated. Packard’s stubborn refusal to accept that American hegemony could possibly be wrong or fail mirrors that of neo-conservatives, Trumpites, and tenders of the military-industrial complex alike, and his mania for killing Kong and thus upsetting the island’s delicate balance of power reflects the destabilizing application of that hegemony across the globe for more than half a century.

Kong: Skull Island, then, is true Kong in as many ways as it is counterfeit Kong. It evades the thematic traditions of tragedy and mixed ideological messages concerning race and sexuality, and settles instead on standard-issue Hollywood assumptions both political and commercial: anti-war liberalism and skepticism of militaristic empire on the one hand, preserving its showpiece simian for continuing franchise sequelization on the other. But it’s an exciting, impeccably shot, inventively-designed action-adventure white-knuckler as well, which is what the greater mass of moviegoers who haven’t dedicated thousands of words to the deeper meanings of giant ape movies surely expect. Skull Island sees the pendulum of Kong screen narratives swing away from elegy and back towards spectacle, where the enduring cinematic myth began. Something is lost, certainly, but something else is gained, and it’s hard to regard a picture as highly enjoyable as this one as merely achieving a balance. It tips decisively to the positive, despite what it leaves off the scale.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016; Directed by Roland Emmerich)

There may be no better predictive model for the current style of the Hollywood blockbuster than 1996’s Independence Day. The cinematic decade of which Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s hugely successful, extremely corny, doggedly entertaining alien invasion epic pastiche represents an obvious middle point includes many such important signposts to our outsized movie present. From Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 and Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000 (vital beachheads of the comics superhero invasion that has conquered Hollywood) to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy of 2001-2003 (important demonstrations of the viability of computer-generated special effects in central filmmaking roles), we can locate many of the foundations of the blockbuster as we now know it (and frequently lament it).

But to my mind, it was Independence Day that, more than any other film, forged the big-budget movie world that we now live in. ID4 (as it was dubbed by studio marketers) was full of shameless borrowings from past hit films, featuring a rag-tag band of plucky American underdogs facing a global existential threat portrayed with SFX verisimilitude (using CGI, yes, though with many more models and practical effects than is generally appreciated). It was shot through with militaristic jingoism and liberty-bell-gonging platitudes with an added twitchy tinge of paranoid conspiracism (given his subsequent work, this was clearly Emmerich’s hand at work) that, while presenting as harmless contemporary folk-myth whimsy at the time, feels more sinister now given America’s current political predicament.

What Independence Day’s 20-years-hence sequel Independence Day: Resurgence makes surprisingly and often painfully clear is how skilled and likable the original’s deployment of unpretentious popcorn-flick entertainment really was. As goofy, predictable, and derivative as it was, as many city-destroying spaceships as you could comfortably pilot through the gaping holes in its plot and character development, ID4 was undeniably fun and charming, coasting on the endearing qualities of its unlikely co-stars, an on-the-cusp-of-superstardom Will Smith (indeed, in the role that pushed him past that cusp) and the indispensable blockbuster-elevating Jeff Goldblum. It was also, as mentioned, willing to be kind of weird, finding space for the peculiar talents of Randy Quaid as an anti-government, alien-abduction-believing kook (alternately, as himself), a wild-eyed Brent Spiner as mad Area 51 scientist Dr. Brakish Okun, and Judd Hirsch carpet-bombing Semitic stereotypes as Julius, the nagging Jewish father of Goldblum’s world-saving David Levinson. It was fundamentally stupid nonsense, but it was almost irrationally easy to enjoy.

This is how truly, incredibly terrible Resurgence is: it has inspired me to wax nostalgic about one of the cheesiest American blockbusters of the past quarter-century. Perversely, Independence Day seems like Citizen Kane in comparison to its thoroughly lackluster sequel. Saddled with incompetent dialogue both expository and exclamatory, thin characterizations, poor acting, CG spectacle at once overwrought and underimagined, scale, pacing, and tension amateurishly applied, and one anemic idea after another, Resurgence is nothing of the sort. It’s more of a degradation, and an unsurprising one given sole director Emmerich’s precipitous decline as a filmmaker since he and Devlin made ID4.

In a rare, nearly-meta convergence of release date and in-text story, Resurgence follows the original Independence Day by exactly 20 years. This allows for the natural aging of returning cast members and an easy explanation of Earth’s technological quantum leaps (utilizing technology salvaged from the hulks of the alien invaders’ destroyed super-ships), but also leaves potentially fascinating storylines of the aftermath of and rebuilding after the War of ’96 languishing in the narrative background, as we’ll see. Earth is now apparently politically and socially united, albeit with America in a primary leadership position, and preparing with great expense and techno-military infrastructure for the aliens’ anticipated return assault. Its great cities have been rebuilt (Washington D.C. is virtually identical, and London, Paris, and major Asian cities have their landmarks restored as well, though perhaps not for long), defense bases are spread across the solar system, and both the sacrifices and triumphs of the prior war are commemorated and celebrated with characteristic mock-solemn American bravado (the obelisk of the Washington Monument now carries the names of millions of the dead).

Key figures in the fightback against the malevolent extraterrestrials in 1996 have varying levels of involvement in the new order, alongside related characters. Levinson is the Director of Some Alien-Killing Research Organization, while his father Julius hawks his book about how he saved the world (an offhand comment of the elder Levinson inspired David’s computer virus plan to defeat the alien mothership) to disinterested retirement-home denizens. Former President Tom Whitmore (Bill Pullman) struggles with nightmares of the extraterrestrials, while his former fighter-pilot daughter Patricia (Maika Monroe) is an aide to the new Commander-in-Chief, President Elizabeth “Nuke Them From Orbit Then Have a Campaign Rally” Lanford (Sela Ward). Her fiancée Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), who lost his parents to the attack in ’96, chafes at the restraints of a position as a space-tug pilot on the lunar defense base alongside his buddy Charlie (Travis Tope).

Jake was busted down the ranks after his reckless piloting nearly killed fellow flying ace Captain Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher) in a training flight. The son of Will Smith’s well-remembered cocky hero pilot Col. Steven Hiller, who is said to have died in a test flight but was really claimed by a star’s taste for better scripts (or not), Dylan is essentially a walking, talking propaganda poster as the leader of an elite international squadron; Chinese pilot Rain Lao (Angelababy; yes, that’s her real stage name) is the only other one of its members to get any real screentime, and then mostly as fodder for Charlie’s puppy-dog affections (and to help with the Chinese box office numbers).

Dr. Okun is back, too, despite having apparently been snatched and tentacularly strangled to death by a captive alien in the first film. He’s been in a coma at Area 51 for two decades, cared for by his devoted assistant/lover Dr. Milton Isaacs (John Storey), and his sudden reawakening is one of several forebodings that the long-dreaded return of Earth’s ultimate antagonists is at hand. Levinson and fellow alien researcher Dr. Catherine Marceaux (Charlotte Gainsbourg) find similar suggestions that the aliens (and perhaps another space visitor as well) are back in Central Africa, where stern warlord Dikembe Umbutu (Deobia Oparei) and his people fought a brutal, often hand-to-hand guerrilla war against a landed ship’s alien crew for years. And back on the lunar base, Luke and Charlie will be at the front lines of the aliens’, well, resurgence.

One of the things that makes Independence Day: Resurgence’s abject failure to be any good even as stupidly rousing popcorn entertainment so maddening is how many far better potential sequels concepts it leaves discarded in its dull inexorable wake like husks of alien superships. As the credits rolled on the original ID4 twenty years ago, I wondered if a possible sequel might take a tonal U-turn and address the daunting rebuilding of human civilization on Earth, perhaps with some mopping-up of surviving alien forces thrown in for action-sequence fodder. Resurgence shunts this complex story into its initial expository background and lacquers over simplistic jingoism: Earth is back, better and more unified than ever! But the U.S.A. is still in charge, woo!

But Resurgence leaves more tantalizing material by the wayside as well, especially one potentially cracking narrative of badass alien-killing that resides not merely in one critic’s fevered imagination and involves considerably fewer depictions of large-scale construction projects. The merely-sketched subplot of Umbutu’s protracted guerrilla war against a surviving alien enclave in Central Africa fills a minor storytelling function early on, and there’s just the slightest beat about the warlord’s deeply-felt family losses in the conflict. But the character soon degenerates into a stereotypical (and more than a little racist) background role, his stiff-jawed warrior’s ethic played for comic relief alongside Floyd Rosenberg (Nicolas Wright), a bureaucratic drip thrust into mortal danger. But what a conceivably intense and fascinating left-turn of a sequel it would have been to have made a harrowing, intimate horror-thriller about his people’s draining battles with the aliens (which may have presented an opportunity for postcolonial metaphors and atonement for the soft-imperial flag-waving of the original) instead of relegating it to backstory duty.

Such a storytelling choice would have required a filmmaker of a whole other stripe than Roland Emmerich, however. His movie aspires to grand ambition but lands on a scale more narrow and venal. Driven centrally by empty nostalgia, it proceeds in predictable swoops of action and reaction, punctuated by sophomoric humour, wan characterizations, and wasted, almost exasperated onscreen talent. Goldblum’s performance in the original was, along with his Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, the foundation for his enduring reputation in movie fandom as a stealth savior of blockbusters. But even his ah, ah, you know, particular line delivery style can’t overcome a fatal dearth of lines worth delivering. The Lesser Hemsworth isn’t better than the material and doesn’t really try to be. Usher is an automaton, with none of the enjoyable irritated attitude of his fictional father. Spiner, a fine comic actor, is made a clown. If Pullman isn’t openly embarrassed by his role in this fiasco, he surely ought to be. Only Maika Monroe, so riveting in the indie-horror nu-classic It Follows, summons any commitment and intensity, and even then can only impart it wordlessly when she’s freed from the burden of speaking her painful dialogue.

All of these factors and more combine forces to render a model of the big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster into a case study in what happens when the deceptively fine balance of the form is clumsily upset. Independence Day was broad, bombastic, silly idiocy that hit its marks with the fine eye of a skilled archer; Independence Day: Resurgence not only fumbles and misses those marks, its bowstring snaps and blinds it in one eye. This woefully atrocious movie is the most direct and lamentable product of Independence Day‘s mixed legacy.

Logan (2017; Directed by James Mangold)

To be entirely frank, I’m firmly of two minds on Logan, the tenth X-men film, third stand-alone Wolverine film, second in a row directed by James Mangold, and quite prominently the final time Hugh Jackman will play the gruff, adamantium-clawed, self-healing, anti-hero superhero. I can fully appreciate and even admire the film’s dirt-under-the-fingernails realism and character-centric agonized drama, its pained performances from the haggard, limping, coughing, physically and emotionally scarred Jackman, as well as an endearing Patrick Stewart as a fading, elderly Charles Xavier. Its pacing, maintenance of tone, viciously violent action, and interplay of image and sound are all technically expert and sometimes transcendent. When its tender bursts of heartstrings-tugging crop up in its closing stages, they feel earned and honest instead of maudlin and manipulative. But it presents far too often as a film that should be appreciated and admired rather than persuading the viewer to enjoy and be moved by it.

Logan is extremely successful at being what it fully intends to be: a comics superhero movie that is so earnest and grounded that it takes the time for a firm meta repudiation of its comic-book origins as fantasy hogwash. Mangold, directing a script he co-wrote with Scott Frank and Michael Green, weaves the bloody-minded, gritty tangibility of the 1970s semi-independent New American Cinema with the lonely, reluctant cowboy hero of Golden Age Westerns (signalled by a clear intertextual reference to the 1953 genre classic Shane). He does the job so very well that you might be forgiven for asking yourself if he really ought to be doing it. More than any comic-book superhero film since Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Logan self-consciously tries to carve out a serious artistic space in a genre that, despite prodigious commercial dominance, continues to struggle to be treated like prestigious cinematic art by the film industry that it has financially enriched. It’s focused on chipping away at these prejudicial conditions with convincing depictions of wincing suffering so singularly that it can, and does, forget to give its audience a fully enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Logan takes Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine to his final extremity. In rural exurban stretches of a dystopian future America in which nearly all of the multitudinous mutants of the X-Universe have been hunted down and wiped out, Logan whiles away his time and saves his precious pennies in anonimity, driving a stretch limousine in El Paso, Texas. He’s concealing Dr. Xavier in an abandoned smelting plant in Mexico, isolating the old man and drugging him silly to control his debilitating psychic seizures, the result of a degenerating brain that makes him a danger to anyone around him. The sun-shy albino Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who can detect the presence of other mutants, aids him in caring for Professor X, though he suspects Logan will exclude him from his retirement escape plan on a private boat in sunny climes.

Logan’s longtime desire to be left alone to pour salt in his many open wounds (his physical ones increasingly remain so, his healing powers’ gradual desertion of his body a sign of its slow degeneration) is irritatingly doubly interrupted. First, a Mexican nurse (Elizabeth Rodriguez) implores him to help her and a small girl in her care named Laura (Dafne Keen, giving the most hypnotic child performance in a gory action film since Natalie Portman in Leon). Logan brushes her aside, but begins to reconsider when Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, a sort of low-rent Southern clone of Charlie Hunnam, himself a clone of a real movie star), the head of security for a mysterious multinational genetics corporation, comes asking after the girl, whose origins his employers likely have something to do with. Laura, who is far more like Logan that he suspects, winds up as his reluctant charge, and the two of them and Xavier set off on a cross-country odyssey to a supposed northern borderland safe haven for mutants with Pierce and his mutie-hunting cyborg squad of Reavers in hot pursuit.

Logan, Xavier, Laura, and their intermittent allies stay barely ahead of and frequently violently dispatch Pierce’s waves of black-clad SWAT types, with calm-but-tense interludes of quiet dialogue, emotional character scenes, and tantalizing but ever-ephemeral shadows of normality interspersed in between the blood. Logan’s path was largely blazed by the smashing success of last year’s similarly-rated X-verse entry Deadpool (and not just in the droll Superman-referencing short scene featuring the red-and-black-suited wag superhero played by Ryan Reynolds running before it in theatres), and the vicious graphic violence of its fight sequences fully earns its R rating in the U.S. It’s “mature” if not actually mature, much as Deadpool was.

Logan thus presents as a strange and sometimes deep-cutting hybrid of Sam Peckinpah, Little Miss Sunshine, spaghetti westerns, and the murkier corners of the Marvel screen universe. It even pulls off its own edgier and more tragic version of the idyllic farmhouse pause in the centre of Avengers: Age of Ultron, giving the weary, besieged travelers a brief reprieve among a humble rural family (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal, and Quincy Fouse) while the narrative is allowed to breathe. The film’s slow burn to a gory climax rises further to an emotional crescendo which cannot be said not to be moving (shrink away from the incandescence of that bit of praise!). Mangold is a skilled enough director to not merely signal an audience how to feel but compel them to feel that way, too, and he vitally tempers Logan‘s scraped-knuckle grimness with a glow of hope.

Jackman staggers and wheezes through a worn-down take on the character that he has defined (and that, for better or worse, has defined him) for 17 years. Exasperated with his artificially extended existence without legacy, stripped of the surrogate X-family that gave him a tentative identity and sense of belonging, his heaving but scarred body a haunted house full of the restless poltergeists of a century of killing, Jackman’s Logan suffers with exquisite persistence here. If there was nothing else to great acting than that (and the Academy’s tendencies of awarding performances that privilege such suffering might persuade you into believing there isn’t), Jackman would be an early frontrunner for Best Actor a year from now. The Academy is unlikely to overcome ingrained genre prejudices for Logan, though, and I’m not saying he is that good here, either; Jackman is, and always has been, too much of a performer to excavate into the deep place of any character, let alone a grumbling mutant with a history of violence and a skeleton of adamantium.

Perhaps inspired by his co-star’s exertions, Stewart’s Charles Xavier (also his last kick at the X-can, if recent press statements can be believed) feebly battles to keep senility and death at bay and maintain an element of himself amidst unspeakable loss and a total defeat of all that he dedicated his life to achieving. With his most well-known work coming in the imaginative, fantastical genres, it’s been easy to undervalue Stewart as an actor, but he is a very, very fine one and shows every bit of his observant, empathetic quality here. Some praise should also be reserved for Stephen Merchant as Caliban, who imbues a fairly thankless supporting role with a deep but irony-edged despondency and dogged buried bravery.

Logan, then, has some good performances, a reasonably character-driven plot sequence, and solid, even exciting, action scenes. Its closing surge of feeling is genuine and potent, giving the prior labors a patina of meaning. All of this should add up to a good (borderline great, even) movie, right? I’m not so sure. Perhaps, as good as this Wolverine movie is, it can only ever be a Wolverine movie, and how much is that ultimately worth? Maybe the most succinct and accurate review I’ve read, in the form of a brief tweet, said exactly that. Logan has an abiding ambition to be more than it is, to transcend and even upend its generic constraints. It should get there, by all of the evidence available. It doesn’t, and it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason why, other than to speculate that maybe, in spite of the best efforts of all involved, it simply can’t be what it is and also more than it is.