Logan (2017) Review – The Wolverine's Final Ride

🌵 Introduction

🧬 This review is part of our X-Men Hub – every X-Men film and show we’ve covered, ranked and explained.

Seventeen years after Hugh Jackman first played Wolverine on screen, Logan gave the character a genuine ending, the kind most franchise films never actually bother earning. Set in a bleak, near-future 2029 where mutants are nearly extinct, it finds Logan aging, ailing, and driving a limo for hire near the Mexican border while quietly caring for a dementia-stricken Professor X — a far cry indeed from the confident, near-immortal soldier of the earlier films in this saga.

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Logan Noir (4K Ultra HD, Black & White Edition) (opens in a new tab)

The black-and-white cut leans even further into the film's Western influences.

I want to be genuinely honest about my score here, because this is a film I respect considerably more than I straightforwardly enjoy on a rewatch: a 3. It’s genuinely well-made, deliberately paced, and it earns every bit of the critical acclaim it received — but it’s also a demanding, bleak watch that isn’t built for the kind of casual rewatch the franchise’s more spectacle-driven entries invite so easily.

👴 Mortality, Finally Given Room to Breathe

Where The Wolverine briefly flirted with giving Logan real physical stakes back in 2013, this film commits to that idea completely: his healing factor is failing, his own adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning him from within, and he’s caring for a Professor X whose degenerative condition makes his psychic powers a genuine, deadly danger to everyone nearby him. Patrick Stewart plays that decline with real, palpable vulnerability — a character audiences had known as calm and controlled for seventeen straight years, now genuinely frightened of his own deteriorating mind for the first time.

Jackman matches him scene for scene, playing Logan as a man who’s stopped believing his life amounts to anything worth protecting, going through the motions of survival rather than actually living. It’s the most textured, least heroic performance he’d given in the role across seventeen years, and it’s exactly what a story about this particular ending needed from him.

There’s a physical dimension to this performance that deserves its own mention: Logan’s healing factor visibly failing means Jackman plays every fight scene with genuine strain and cost, wincing through injuries that would have simply vanished in earlier films. That small shift in physical performance does as much work establishing his newfound mortality as any single line of dialogue in the script — you can see, in his body language alone, a man who used to be genuinely unstoppable and now, very visibly, is not.

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Old Man Logan (Marvel Comics) (opens in a new tab)

The comic storyline that partly inspired the film's tone and title.

🐆 Laura: A Genuine Discovery

Dafne Keen’s Laura — a young girl engineered from Logan’s own DNA, sharing his claws and healing factor — is largely wordless for much of the film’s first half, and Keen carries that silence with a ferocity that never feels like a gimmick. Her arc, from a feral weapon to something resembling a daughter, gives Logan a reason to care about his own survival again, and it’s the emotional engine that makes the film’s back half land as hard as it does.

The road-trip structure — Logan, Xavier, and Laura crossing the country toward a rumored safe haven for young mutants called Eden — gives the film room to let that relationship develop gradually instead of rushing it. A quiet motel scene where the trio briefly poses as a normal family at a stranger’s dinner table is one of the film’s very best, most understated moments, precisely because it shows exactly what Logan has been running from his entire life: the ordinary, unremarkable domesticity he’s never once let himself actually have. It makes the film’s eventual, devastating final stretch land with the full accumulated weight of everything that one small scene promised and ultimately couldn’t keep for any of them.

🤠 A Neo-Western, Not a Superhero Movie

The film’s biggest formal choice is genre: this is a road movie shot with the patience and visual language of a Western, not a comic-book blockbuster. Long stretches pass without any use of powers at all, favoring quiet, dialogue-driven scenes between Logan, Xavier, and Laura. When the violence does arrive, it’s unflinching in a way the rest of the franchise never was — a deliberate contrast that earned Logan a hard R rating and, later that year, a rare Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination.

The film borrows directly and openly from classic Western iconography — a copy of Shane plays on a motel TV at one point, a not-so-subtle nod to the genre director James Mangold is deliberately working in, and the parallels between that film’s aging gunslinger and Logan’s own reluctant final ride are impossible to miss once you notice them. It’s a genre choice that suits this specific material far better than a typical action-movie framework ever could have, since Westerns have always been comfortable letting their heroes be tired, flawed, and genuinely mortal in ways mainstream superhero cinema so rarely allows itself to be — the polar opposite instinct from the irreverent, genre-mocking approach our Deadpool 2 review covers, released the following year.

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Free 30-day trial — the standard movies & TV CTA. Catalogues change constantly, so check before you commit a movie night to it.

👨‍👦 The Dad Angle: Caretaking, Legacy, and Letting Go

Underneath the Western trappings, Logan is a film about caring for someone who’s declining, and about what you owe the people who come after you even when you’ve stopped believing you matter. That’s a genuinely heavy, adult theme — watching a once-powerful father figure lose himself to illness, and watching Logan reluctantly become a protector again for a child he never asked for — and it lands with real weight for anyone who’s navigated caretaking in their own family, whether for an aging parent or a child who suddenly needs more from them than they felt ready to give.

The film’s closing minutes, which I won’t spoil here, do something genuinely rare for the genre: they let an ending actually be an ending, without leaving a door open for a walk-back or a surprise return. That commitment is a genuinely large part of why the film earned the critical respect it eventually did — it treats its own finality as something worth taking seriously and sitting with, rather than a marketing decision waiting to be quietly reversed the moment box-office numbers justify it.

It’s rated R for graphic violence and profanity, and it’s the most brutal film in the franchise by a wide margin. Not appropriate for kids or family movie night — this one’s strictly for after they’re in bed.

For the film that first set Wolverine on this path, our review of the original X-Men (2000) is where Jackman’s seventeen-year run began — a run the mainline saga itself would close out two years later, on a far less certain note, in our review of X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

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Logan Noir (4K Ultra HD, Black & White Edition) (opens in a new tab)

The black-and-white cut leans even further into the film's Western influences.

Want to watch it tonight? Prime Video’s 30-day free trial is worth grabbing to close out the full Wolverine arc. For the shelf, the Wolverine Funko POP is a fitting way to mark seventeen years of Jackman in the role.

Is Logan (2017) worth watching?

Yes, though it’s a demanding watch rather than an easy one. It’s a deliberately bleak, unhurried send-off that trades spectacle for mortality and grief, and Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart both give career-best performances. A respected 3/5 — genuinely well-made, but not built for casual rewatching.

Was Logan nominated for an Oscar?

Yes — Logan received a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination at the 90th Academy Awards, an exceptionally rare honor for a superhero film, recognizing the maturity and craft of its script.

Is Logan based on the Old Man Logan comic?

Partially. The film borrows the general tone and premise — an aged, weary Wolverine in a bleak future — from Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan storyline, but tells a substantially different story with different characters and stakes.

Who plays Laura/X-23 in Logan?

Dafne Keen, in her film debut, plays Laura — a young girl genetically engineered from Logan’s DNA with the same claws and healing factor. Her largely wordless early performance is one of the film’s most acclaimed elements.

Is Logan appropriate for kids?

No. It’s rated R for graphic violence and profanity, and it’s the most brutal, unflinching film in the entire franchise — a deliberate departure from the PG-13 tone of every mainline X-Men film. Not appropriate for kids or family viewing.