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****
Dir: James Mangold (15, 120 mins)
Hugh Jackman’s last hurrah as the adamantium clawed Wolverine marks a change in tone from his previous outings. More in the vein of Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan series of stories, with the elegiac feel of Westerns like Unforgiven, this has Logan stripped back to his basics, vulnerable and no longer the fighting force he once was, as a beating that opens the film swiftly shows. It’s a future in which no new mutants have been born for two decades, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X is infirm and disillusioned and Wolverine is scraping a living as a limo driver whilst co-habiting bizarrely with Stephen Merchant’s nursemaid Caliban. A woman comes a-knocking with a problem that will snap them back into life however, and he takes a ferocious young girl under his wing played by Dafne Keen, who has some adamantium claws of her own – X-23 to comic book completists. Set in a grittier world than any of its X-Men cousins, this will be a violent, downbeat affair as the unlikely trio go on the run to evade Boyd Holbrook’s mutant hunter Frank Pierce, with bloody and moving results. Stewart and Jackman should make a winning combo and freed from the confusing interconnectivity of the other X-Men films, Logan should offer a more satisfying, adult take on superheroism. Snikt, snikt.
Opens March 3