The previews for Logan made it look like a road trip/buddy movie starring Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart, which would have been worth the price of admission with no superpowers involved whatsoever.
In promotions, Hugh Jackman (now along with Stewart) has said this will be his last movie playing his “X-Men” character. In a way, the X-Men movies are victims of their own success. See, years ago when Marvel Comics was in financial straits (and producing truly sucktastic movies), they sold Sony Pictures the movie rights to their most prominent superhero characters – X-Men/Wolverine, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. But shortly after the first X-Men movie, Marvel created its own movie studio and made a very successful run of films using Iron Man and other titles. And for every very good Sony superhero movie (like X2) there was at least one “whatever” movie like X-Men: Apocalypse that didn’t improve the reputation of the brand. This is important because of intellectual property rights; not only are the X-Men movies in a different setting than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, legally, any new characters Marvel creates for its X-Men comic books will be owned by Sony Pictures for movie purposes, meaning that Marvel has no reason to create new characters and storylines for what is now a rival studio. So even though X-Men comics have made a TON of money for Marvel Comics, in recent years they eliminated most of their X-Men titles and killed much of their mutant lineup, including Wolverine himself, who has since been succeeded by his female clone. This roughly parallels the situation in this movie.
Logan is set several years in the future, after an unexplained event has killed off most of the mutants on Earth. The X-Men are a distant memory (ironically, now used to sell comic books). Logan, no longer calling himself Wolverine, has started to lose his healing factor, which means he is finally starting to age and feel the effects of injury. He supports himself as a limo driver in Texas, but is basically killing time. However, his old mentor Charles Xavier (Stewart) has learned of the existence of the first mutant child to be seen in years, who must be rescued from those who would exploit her. However, Xavier’s own advancing age is causing his psychic powers to malfunction, with tragic results.
Logan was directed by James Mangold, who also directed the other stand-alone Logan movie, The Wolverine, which actually had a similar premise where Logan loses his regeneration power and has to face the idea of being vulnerable. However in that movie, Wolverine’s power loss was temporary and a plot device driving the story. Here it is part of the overall theme. The movie’s depiction of old age and decline is that much more heart-wrenching when Logan is compared to Xavier, given that Professor X was always the father figure and conscience of the X-Men.
But if you see this movie, you won’t have time to be depressed by the tragedy, because it is violent and foul-mouthed AS FUCK. That’s right, you will get to hear Captain Picard say the word “fuck.” In various conjugations. And there was one chase scene where I could have been watching the next Mad Max movie.
Now, again, it isn’t explained whether this is the true future of the movie X-Men universe, and given that that future has been retconned at least once, it doesn’t particularly matter. Superheroes are corporate property: If the studio wanted, they could just recast these characters and start the story over, as Sony has done with Spider-Man no less than three times by now. But it’s clear that Hugh Jackman, as a real person living in the temporal universe, realized he couldn’t play an immortal warrior forever. So if you’re going to go out, go big. And fortunately Mangold has given us both a very exciting and very affecting movie as a literal burial of the X-Men movie series.
And the moral? Sometimes guns DO solve all your problems.