I saw Logan last night, and it was pretty good.  One thing that bothered me was the huge standee in the theater lobby with all kinds of quotes from reviewers raving about how earth-shattering it was and how it “transcends” the action genre.  I find Hollywood and its attendant reviewers are generally so nauseatingly trivial and over-hyped now that an ad like that would actually lead me to avoid a film – if I wasn’t a Jackman fan I would have avoided this one.  I mean what about this movie is supposed to “transcend” the genre?  It’s very well done but it follows all the usual archetypal plot threads to the letter.  Maybe I should do a post just to analyze all the exaggerated, mountain-out-of-molehill reviews.

What a sad world, where Carrie Fisher is dead and the cardboard goons who write that drivel are still alive. 

I thought Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” was a leap forward in action movies.  I don’t think “Logan” is a leap forward but it’s certainly one of the best superhero movies I’ve seen. It isn’t earth-shattering at all, it’s just really emotionally satisfying.  Dafne Keen is very charismatic. It’s fun to watch her whirling viciously around like Yoda in her fight scenes.  I’ll be looking forward to the next installment for her character.

There’s a lot of good scenes between Xavier and Logan.  They really brought they characters solidly down to earth and made them make sense in a dystopian future.

In fact, it brought them down to earth so well that even though I usually avoid writing or even thinking seriously about anything coming out of the insipid toilet that Hollywood has become, I got emotionally involved enough to write a bit of my own review here.  I really appreciate the work of the team that made this movie. I was already an admirer of Stewart and Jackman, so the big change is that I’ll be looking out for more of Mangold (who directed “Girl, Interrupted”) and Dafne Keen.