Logan
“At some point, we need to stop glorifying the deaths of saintly, self-sacrificial minorities and women, and instead offer them better roles and agency over their own lives.”
Title: Logan (2017)
Director: James Mangold 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: James Mangold 👨🏼🇺🇸, Scott Frank 👨🏼🇺🇸, and Michael Green 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 4.5/5
With beautiful cinematography and world-building, incredible action scenes, and genuine soul, Logan stands out among standard superhero fare. It weaves together themes of guilt, depression, and hope into a story that starts a bit slow, but quickly catches momentum, making its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime enjoyable rather than a chore.
Gender: 2/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely
Logan is incredibly male-centric. We could argue that the young mutant Laura, played with incredible virtuosity by Dafne Keen, is one of the main characters and should net this movie a better category on Gender. However, the real hero is Logan (Hugh Jackman), and Logan alone. The film is an intimate dissection of Wolverine’s psyche, leaving no room for other complex characters. Even Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is pigeonholed as a mentor while Laura is Logan’s chance for redemption.
Beyond her, female roles are few and far in between. When they do appear, women are portrayed primarily as victims who die in order to protect their children (this happens twice), or as young Mexican women artificially inseminated with mutant babies, then killed (not depicted, but spoken of). Or as a gaggle of young women, one of whom flashes Logan (and the audience). #MaleGaze.
On the plus side, we also see a scattering of young, female mutants who have little to no lines, but who are the only group of women with any sort of control over their own lives. Better than nothing.
Race: 3.5/5
There’s ample Latino representation in Logan, but they falls into a few traps. For starters, the opening scene shows Logan murdering a small group of Mexican gangsters. (Arguably, plenty of white people also get ruthlessly cut down over the course of the film, but the optics aren’t great.) Later on, a well-meaning Black family is slaughtered because of Logan, the father sacrificing himself so that Logan and Laura can get away—subconscious conditioning that white lives are worth more than Black lives.
Furthermore, the film’s main character of color, Mexican girl Laura, is played by British-Spanish actress Keen. (Don’t get me wrong, Keen is fantastic in the role. But authentic casting, this is not.) On the plus side, a group of Mexican children have a pivotal role in the film, and they’re cast with actors of various skin colors, showing how diverse Latinos are. These kids, including Laura, all have great scenes full of self-determination, especially considering the constraints of a film whose sole focus was that of one man’s personal journey.
Bonus for Disability: +0.00
Charles Xavier’s nuanced characterization as a wheelchair user would have earned this film half a bonus point. But actor Stephen Merchant’s portrayal of Caliban, who has albinism, feels offensive. With Merchant’s face caked in white face powder, Caliban appears ghoulish and gets repeatedly tortured. Sure, this is true to the comics. But problematic source material doesn’t have to be carried over into a modern movie. It would have been easy enough for director James Mangold to cast an actor who actually has albinism, or to craft Caliban’s character with less grotesqueness.
Bonus for Age: +0.50
Coming back to Charles Xavier, his realistic portrait of a nonagenarian who is neither perfectly healthy, nor a hapless, bumbling adult in his later years, gives Logan a small boost.
Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.50/5
This wonderful film is beautiful, angsty, and exciting to watch. It’s too bad that women are nearly all portrayed as victims, save for Laura who’s a force to be reckoned with. And while it’s positive that Logan has a robust showing of actors of color, it falls short when it comes to the quality of those roles.
At its heart, Mangold’s film remains the psychological story of a white man who gets to be both savior and martyr despite the vast amounts of blood on his hands, much of it innocent. Now that’s a story we’ve seen before, both on screen and off.