I’m too sexy for my existential crisis.

He’s a BLADE RUNNER in 2049. And he’s a Replicant – a robot that resembles humans. And he hunts older-model Replicants that are not as gorgeous as him. And – unlike the last guy – he’s terrific at his job!

Ryan Gosling is Agent K, a Nexus-9 Replicant, the newest products of the Wallace Company, trusted to the extent that they are embedded in the police units known as blade runners – actually hunting other Replicants. (House niggers of the future!) Unlike the older Replicants with the four-year lifespan, that were implanted with memories and thought they were human, K has an open-ended lifespan, implanted memories and knows he is not human. So do all the other human police, who deride him as a “fucking skin-job” at every opportunity.

We meet K on a particularly tough “retirement” job, against a bodybuilt Replicant (Dave Bautista) who speaks of a “miracle” before his demise.

Before we go any further, note that we are in the first scene of the movie, and already we are so beautifully immersed in futuristic élan, we take it for granted. Like its predecessor, the sights and technologies and concepts are seamlessly woven into BLADE RUNNER 2049: K’s drone, videoing and infrared-scanning the area, K’s hovercar and its interior, the steel-choked city that K flies over to arrive at this desolate farm stretching into the ochre distance… The difference between Ridley Scott’s 1982 BLADE RUNNER and this movie is that we expect to see seamless wondrous efx shots. Yet it’s not bombastic efx for the sake of impressing the children of JUPITER ASCENDING or VALERIAN. To their credit, the production designers and art department have done Ridley Scott proud,  keeping this whole production looking uniquely BLADE RUNNER, capturing not only the synthetic feel of the atmosphere in a dreary rain-drenched Los Angeles overrun by corporate ads, but the visceral tone of the first film, a cerebral orgasmatron of wired teeth and leather fists.

“Tell me how my lips may be of service to you? Honestly, I have no idea.”

And there is something more. Screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, with director Denis Villenueve, have meshed their visually intense experience with a level of anxiety and claustrophobia that borders on true horror movie eeriness. A sense of dread pervades almost every scene, not the usual action movie suspense of bad guys versus good guys, but that ominous feeling you get when the hand under your bed is about to grab your leg.

So it is this dread that creeps up our spines when K unearths a secret box of bones on Bautista’s farm. Just what the—?

Back at base, after any disturbing mission, K undergoes the strident “baseline test” Whereas the original movie’s Voight-Kampff test was a relaxed series of questions to determine lack of empathy in a Replicant, in this movie the mind-intrusive process is to ensure the Replicant has not gained empathy; now a rigorous, clinical process of anxiety-inducing questions shotgunned at you.

Severe Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Penn) informs K the bones belong to Rachael – a Replicant who fled in 2019 with Blade Runner Deckard (Harrison Ford)! And she – died in childbirth. Bautista’s words come back to haunt K, “Because you’ve never seen a miracle!” He was referring to the child born of a Replicant. But this means she wasn’t a Replicant – she was a Repli-CAN. (Somebody slap me.)

Joshi orders K to find the child and “retire” it – before the public becomes aware that Replicants can give birth. The Earth is already a cluttered wasteland of the unfortunate lower classes who couldn’t afford to relocate off-world, and the panic of discovering that Replicants were blurring the lines between themselves and humans would devastate what remained of civilization, causing people to buy up all the toilet paper. Studies show this is how civilization falls…

Joshi asks K what would happen if she finished the bottle of whiskey they were sharing… Amazingly, K turns down Robin Wright’s hardbody – in favor of a softbody he has at home by the name of Joi (Ana de Armas – those lips!).

An A.I. hologram girlfriend that cooks, cleans and caresses (and might even be prettier than Ryan Gosling), Joi lays down a translucent steak dinner over K’s unappetizing sludge. Her existence depends on a wall panel and projection arms, so when K gifts her an “emanator,” it’s actually for him – a remote box that allows her to travel outside the tyranny of line of sight of her projector, so K can download her and take Joi anywhere…. (By the way, thank you to the writers for solving the girlfriend problem, which is not about turning them ON, but turning them OFF – when a call or text comes through, Joi freezes like a video being paused, so that K can read or answer his hologram messages. Wallace Company, you’ve sold me! Have one delivered to my home address, please.)

BLADE RUNNER 2049 cannot be digested by virgins. There is too much connective tissue with the cyberpunk original for a newbie or a forgetful veteran to appreciate. Thus I urge all Movie Maniacs – newbies and veterans alike – to watch BLADE RUNNER before immersing yourselves in the almost-superior BLADE RUNNER 2049. After all, it’s been 35 years. And a lot of implanted memories will be reinforced or proven fake when you renew your baseline. The smallest details of this film will jigsaw into place for you. You can thank me later.

K, though not human, has reservations about his mission: “I’ve never retired something that was born before.” Joshi: “What’s the difference?” K: “To be born is to have a soul, I guess.” (So the superstition of religion made it to 2049. And they implanted this stupidity/ignorance into their best model robots?! Wallace Company, make sure you keep that shit outa my sex doll.)

So begins K’s quest to hunt down the child of Deckard and Rachael. But clues leading to Deckard also lead K to the discovery that his memories were not implants, but real. A tiny wooden horse features in the most eerie throughline of the movie – truly, these sequences are horror-movie worthy – further confusing K, who visits the Memory Maker (Carla Juri), determined to dispel his fears, but she discombobulates him even more by acting too much like Amanda Plummer.

Joshi tells K he is “miles off his baseline.”

In this movie, the twist is in the blade runner himself: whereas Deckard was a human that suspected he might be Replicant, K is a Replicant that suspects he might be human. Not just any human – the child of a Replicant and a human – the child of Deckard! (That’s about right – Ryan Gosling’s face and abs are so perfect, he could only be a manufactured robot – or spawned by the Sexiest Man Alive 1998!)

The plot thickens: Corporate Wallace himself (Jared Leto, blind, with a hovering armada of eye-drones) is on his own quest to create a Replicant that can give birth, to accrue an army of Replicant slaves – or at least, that’s what I get from all his nebulous, faux-intellectual ramblings. His go-fer is a Nexus-8 Replicant named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), whom he unleashes to track down Deckard and the child…

Hmm, Luv and Joi. Too clever-clever? Luv is pursuing K, trying to wipe out his Joi. He must get his hands around the throat of Luv to drown her in a sinking car. Is it just me reading this subtext, fellas?

Composers Benjamin Wallfisch (IT 2017) and Hans Zimmer (DUNKIRK) take their cues from the original’s Vangelis synth soundtrack to forge a “futuristic” sound design, at times raucous, disorienting and ear-splitting—[record scratch]—Where the hell is Harrison Ford?! Ah yes, the candy trailers sold you on Ryan and Harrison frolicking together in an orange froyo bedazzle – but Ford only appears late in the story as a very expensive McGuffin. Harrison’s smooth velvet slides out of the orange-black, pointing that gun at Ryan, bringing with him a much-needed ironic comedy relief.

Edward James Olmos reprises his role as Gaff, looking like the Mexican Colonel Sanders here, still folding origami animals.

Mackenzie Davis (how serendipitous that she’s a cross between Sean Young and Daryl Hannah) is a hooker that Joi hires for K, in a sad sequence where she tries to scratch K’s unscratchable itch, meshing her perfect beauty with the prostitute’s filthy booty – like sex with 3D glasses on.

And there’s even Barkhad Abdi (from CAPTAIN PHILIPS “I’m the captain now!”).

And we might THINK Sean Young cameos as Rachael… BUT… unbelievable as it sounds, that’s a CGI rendition! Yes, our real world version of a Replicant! (And Young had to be credited in the movie – because she is – SO – FUCKING – REAL!)

A Replicant freedom fighter tells K: “If a baby can come from one of us – we are our own masters.” Mackenzie echoes the original movie’s slogan: “More human than human.” Because “dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.”

Thus exposing the flaw in Wallace’s Grand Plan: he wants Replicants to reproduce for him “to populate a million worlds” as slaves. But how does he plan to police those slaves? Because if the Replicant freedom fighters have their way, they’d reproduce to amass an army against him and the humans. And even if “his” Replicants reach that million-world stage, they’d resort to the “rights and freedoms” stage quicksmart. Like every Darth and Caesar and Fuhrer and Dumbo Donald before him, Wallace’s desire outpaces his reality.

Director Villeneuve, known for his controlled, solemn filmmaking style (SICARIO, ARRIVAL 2016), along with his cinematographer, production designers and art directors, assault us with sights and sounds and emotions; twists of plot, dynamic performances shrouded in somberness, and creative credible fight scenes where we can witness K being terrific at his job.

In the scene where Wallace confronts Deckard, with the shadows of the surrounding pool cascading off the roof and walls, the LIGHTING keeps changing, seemingly in real time (meaning it’s a practical effect!), from heavy orange fading to gray, then black, then slowly back to stark raving orange again; this cycles during an unbroken take and is amazing for its continuity challenges!

We do not realize it as it progresses, but after we dismount, we realize that watching this movie is like riding a unicorn. Because everyone involved with the making of this movie – like K – is terrific at their jobs!

END

As long as you have a face, I’ll always have a place to eat.

In space, no one can hear you mandroid.

Back in 1979, ALIEN was all about the Aliens. Now it’s about the mandroids. And no wonder. The resident mandroid in ALIEN: COVENANT is Michael Fassbender.

And haven’t I always effused over Michael Fassbender’s magnetic onscreen presence? Unwittingly or not, he has become the focal point of the modern ALIEN saga. Since the last ALIEN installment, PROMETHEUS (2012), his “synthetic human” David has been searching for the purpose of his existence almost as sagaciously as his human crewmate counterparts. In COVENANT, he finds his truth. The hissing, stabbing, disemboweling titular Alien xenomorphs are mere stepping stones in his path to robot redemption…

And I love it! I can already hear the whining that this particular story tack does not serve the greater ALIEN universe, and I can surely see the problems inherent in trying to pass this movie off as mid-part of a trilogy that is prequel to the original ALIEN movie, however, writer-director Ridley Scott (though he creates connectivity with ALIEN through the gradual appearance of the opening titles, camera techniques, sound design and creature design) opens a compelling hive of ideas in making Mankind’s ultimate fate decided by Mankind’s own creation.

This ain’t your daddy’s Bishop…

Fassbender, scanning the skies for more Fassbender.

ALIEN: COVENANT is a majestic, foaming, throat-rending serpent of a film with concepts that will blow your mind as well as your chest cavity, production values that stun with their technical detail, shot through with a stark, madness-inducing soundtrack (by Jed Kurzel) that is not so much music as steel teeth on shoulder blades.

It is 2104. On her seven-year journey to the nearest habitable planet, the colonization starship named Covenant, transporting 2000 hypersleeping humans and 1000 embryos, with a crew of 15. Woken from their slumber by a solar flare, the crew receives an emergency transmission from a passing planet. They detour to investigate… (hmm, this sure sounds like an ALIEN movie, like, you know – ALIEN).

A malfunction in their sleeping pods burns their captain alive (James Franco cameo) and makes the crew uneager to resume their hypersleep to the distant planet, so, discovering the passing planet is habitable, they ponder on putting down roots. Until something in the air infiltrates two crew members and bursts fully-formed from their spines. Until something comes screeching from the dark to take chunks out of their hides. Until something leaps onto someone’s face and drives its feeding tube down their gullet…

In a prologue, we meet Fassbender as android David, already cultured and educated at his “awakening” by his creator Weyland (Guy Pearce). He names himself when he casts his gaze over Michelangelo’s David. Last we saw of him, David’s dismembered body (and still-functioning head) was onboard a “horseshoe” alien craft piloted by Noomi Rapace, bound for the planet of the Engineers…

The spaceship Covenant also has its Fassbender, the same model android called Walter. (But – because it’s Fassbender – Walter has a different accent and demeanor to David!) As Walter helps the crew against a night attack by ferocious assailants, a hooded David comes to their rescue. One of the coolest moments in the film is when David pulls back his hood – and no one is surprised it’s a Fassbender android. Besides, what’s better than one Fassbender? Why, TWO Fassbenders of course!

David, his Iggy Pop hair long and stringy, gives Walter a curt “Hello brother,” as he passes him.

Poffy Fassbender and Paffy Fassbender: Synthetic Cucumber Bros.

What incredible visuals! By the time David is leading the crew to a stony haven through a city of scorched corpses, we have already been inundated by so many jaw-dropping sights: the solar sail on the ship (as Sagan once predicted), seeing storms in the atmosphere of the planet as they descend, the landing pod coming in over the lake, between mountains; as the emergency beacon is neared, the scarred jungle and then – one of the most satisfying payoffs in recent cinematic history – the crash-landed horseshoe spaceship!

To say nothing of the subtle visuals – like the two Fassbender androids onscreen at the same time, where the camera is panning across and around them constantly, seamlessly; they both put their hands on a recorder to play it together, they fight in closeup, they – kiss! (Even Fassbender cannot resist Fassbender!)

Ridley Scott once again populates his crew with tough females, but their roles pale beside that of the android; they now seem like stock inclusions, vestigial ghost notes of Ripley. When The Fassbender is onscreen, no one is usurping his spotlight.

Katherine Waterston is Daniels, ad hoc Ripley. Billy Crudup is ad hoc captain, Oram. And in a daring bit of stunt casting, Danny McBride is Texan pilot Tennessee (replete with cowboy hat and toughguy cred). The rest of the crew (Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett) is here to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for the Aliens. Viewers have complained that the ship’s crew being paired into married couples does not stir much empathy when their characters are never fleshed out enough to care. (Feasting Alien looks up: “Someone say ‘flesh out’?”) Thus, Daniels lost not only her captain in Franco but her husband. A shred of empathy peeks through, but not enough to– (Feasting Alien: “Someone say ‘shred’?”)

The grandeur of interstellar horseshoes.
[Note the tiny man on a rock in center frame.]

To us, David’s quandary may seem: Is he Adam, the first of a species, instilled with the right to spawn his own kind? Or is he Lucifer, the light bringer, the fallen angel ripped from heaven, bequeathed powers that he is exhorted not to use? (David: “Serve in Heaven or reign in Hell?”) His ultimate actions tell us David sees himself as much more celestial than those earthbound entities – he considers himself a god; hence, his amorality, when it comes to his part in the fates of the Engineers and Noomi Rapace…

As we, the creations, see ourselves as the heroes against our creators, the Engineers, Ridley Scott has re-framed the ALIEN franchise as peeking out through the eyes of the android, David, who sees himself as the hero against his creators, Humans. Endowed with the will to create, he has no time for empathy or frailty. He said in PROMETHEUS: “Sometimes to create, one must first destroy.”

Here, with his secret Alien breeding experiments, he has graduated to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” He does well to quote that poem, for the rest of it details the ruins of a colossal monument, around which nothing survives.

As COVENANT ramps toward its rendezvous with 1979’s ALIEN, we see more connections – the computer is called Mother again, there are corridor scenes following blips on a radar that recall ALIEN, the Aliens start to look humanoid – and we discover WHY these interstellar Aliens mimic our physiognomy. The clues were in ALIEN 3 and ALIEN: RESURRECTION; when that Alien burst from the Rottweiler and assumed a bestial stance, and when Ripley’s genes were combined with the Alien Queen birthing that humanoid monstrosity.

All due to… mandroid Fassbender. We can safely say it was Fassbender artificially selecting Alien-Human hybrids in 2104 that led directly to Sigourney Weaver getting down to her panties in 1979.

END

I call this look “Park Bench At Sunrise.” You like?

Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter…

It’s not really a swansong for Logan. It’s not exactly an elegy for The Wolverine. No, LOGAN is actually the final curtain for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Because Jackman, so perfectly cast 17 years ago in X-MEN, became so adamantium-grooved into the character, that he is inextricably identified with the Canadian mutant known as James Howlett/Logan/Wolverine. So in order for the 48-year-old Jackman to hang up his claws righteously and go have a donut, he also had to bring the character to an end. Thus, we must ask ourselves, who then are we crying for when the final cross is turned sideways to mark an X over the grave?

There will be spoilers. If you haven’t guessed by now.

Sad, somber and ultra-violent, LOGAN is truly – as Hugh Jackman hoped – the UNFORGIVEN of superhero movies, where we meet the anti-hero well past his prime, forced to go on one last quest, and inadvertently finding a bittersweet redemption.

Elegy for a Cucumber…

Year 2029. All the mutants with the form-fitting costumes and metrosexual hairstyles are dead, and no more mutants are being born. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), now in his doddering nineties, is in hiding with Logan (Jackman) and another mutant named Caliban (Stephen Merchant – yes, the man behind THE OFFICE, in an excellent dramatic turn as the albino tasked to care for Xavier and hurl insults at Logan. We never quite figure Caliban’s mutant power, except maybe making his whining bearable due to his British accent.). Logan has adopted his birth name, Howlett, and drives limos for seedy clients along the Mexico/U.S. border, planning to save enough money to buy a boat and sail off into the sunset with Xavier, who is slowly losing his mind. It’s a pipe dream, fluttering around the edges of sanity, as their existence also seems to be.

The adamantium in Logan’s skeleton that makes him invulnerable is poisoning him, faster than his mutant healing factor can regenerate his cells. As he painfully pushes bullets out of his chest wounds, it dawns on us that he is becoming mortal. Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, Logan is finding out the hard way.

I will say, it’s a shock to the system seeing Jackman/Wolverine in this pathetic physical state: though he’s still built like a freight train, he limps, he’s shoddy, unwashed, unshaven – his infamous half-beard has grown into an unambiguous full beard (is there nothing sacred?) – and he’s keeping himself drunk and irritable. Logan is sad, exhausted, distrustful, and when he goes berserk in this R-rated movie (a trait that could never be fully realized in previous PG-13 outings), the violence is brutal and blood-drenched. Charles Xavier is also worn out, feared and discarded by society, his telekinetic powers not entirely under his control. No matter how much we might pine for the simple cartoon characteristics of old, LOGAN is not for the weak-hearted.

“So this is how Bruce Willis feels during a DIE HARD movie.”

And the language! I do declare, Beauregard! Well, I never! It is easy to digest Logan swearing like a street scrapper, but to hear Xavier swearing is jarring; I mean, he’s a learned professor – even if he put up with Logan’s potty mouth, one would think he would not stoop to that street vernacular himself. Is this what the world has come to? Xavier saying, “I’m fucking 90!”

When Logan is tasked to transport a scrappy little girl, Laura (Dafne Keen), to an apocryphal destination, the movie comes into focus. Government spooks led by a steel-armed merc named Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) are after Laura, and stumble upon a bonus: “As I live and breathe – the Wolverine!” (When Pierce says the name, a thrill flirts up our spines – just the mention of that name makes it all snikt powerfully into place!) Xavier is another prize quarry for Pierce, who explains that the government wants to register Xavier’s brain as a Weapon of Mass Destruction; and we kinda see the sense as Pierce explains how “dangerous a degenerative brain disease would be in the world’s most dangerous brain.”

Richard E. Grant is another government scientist. Unlike other X-Men movies, the government is no longer scared of muties and don’t want to kill ‘em all, or cure ’em for that matter – they want to weaponize them, which is why they pursue.

Exposition is a little clunky as Xavier and Logan watch hidden camera footage (edited as cogently as a ROCKY montage) and discover Laura is called X23, a mutant engineered with Logan’s own genes in a secret gubmint lab. Hence, retractable double-claws in her forearms – and foot claws for added sass. Other mutant children are seen escaping the lab. X23’s quest: to rendezvous with them at a mutant haven called Eden, described… in an X-Men comic! Worlds collide as Logan denounces X23’s X-Men comics, “Maybe a quarter of it happened – and not this way…”

Both Xavier and X23 consider Logan her “father,” but Logan is not so quick to agree: “Look, kid. I’m not who you think I am!”

So cute she can disembowel you before you think about playing with her My Little Pony.

The gore is exceptional. A scene where Logan struggles against Xavier’s mental concussion waves, to kill a bunch of assailants in seeming “slow-motion.” His arm-katanas creamily injected through skulls and chests and bellies, flesh parting, blood gouting, illustrating how lethal those claws are. We have to imagine this is what was happening throughout Logan’s killing sprees – but off-camera. When he jumped off the balcony in X-MEN 2 and sliced into four assailants, they all died off-camera. Now we see the graphic consequences of having adamantium claws “that can slice through vanadium steel like butter” (whatever that means – Wolverine comics used to love that phrase).

And there is the inspirational fury of X23, that gives us a spark of hope that the legacy will live on. After all, in comics, X23 has already gone on to bear the code name Wolverine. And though Dafne Keen is only the age of Hit-Girl in KICK-ASS, her ferociousness stirs something feral in our loins [and is there any way I can say that WITHOUT sounding like a perve? I guess not…], with an acting maturity far beyond her pre-teen years. One can only speculate what the future holds for the Wolverine brand…

Road movie maximus, Xavier, Logan and X23 on the run, through car chases, bladed slaughter scenes and one very portentous interlude.

When a farmer’s horses escape a trailer on the highway, Xavier tells Logan to stop and help. Logan snarls, “Someone will come along.” Xavier: “Someone has come along.” He closes his eyes and psychically corrals the horses. Not only is this a poignant scene illustrating Xavier is not totally gone (he is kept medicated – in his words, “pharmaceutically castrated”), it is a lesson in behavior for this fractured, polarized society. Yes, you can walk past someone in need, knowing “someone else” will come to their aid – but you are here RIGHT NOW. Why not you? If not now, when?

“I’ll make the incisions here, here and here.”

Stopping for the night at the farmer’s home (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal and Quincy Fouse as the family), we experience a quiet respite from the bloodsport. Soothing. The polar opposite of adamantium murder and frenzied decapitation. And Xavier tells Logan, “This is what Life looks like. A family, people who love you. You should take a moment, feel it.” Logan brushes it off with a grunt.

Thus, Logan’s dying breath can be taken two ways: “This is what it feels like…”

Some think Logan is referring to dying, a condition he has been deprived of over centuries, yet if we hearken back to Xavier’s words, and add the final whimper of X23 as she holds him close, “Daddy…” we see the movie has come a long way to rend our hearts. We realize that the brusque Logan, guarded, lonely, selfish and wary (“Bad shit happens to people I care about”), in his last flickering moments, experienced Life as Xavier described – the elation of caring for someone else and having them care for you.

Probably only one moment of levity in this almost depressing saga: After delivering Laura to Eden, Logan lies unconscious… while the kids of Eden, to his chagrin, trim his beard into the half-beard/sideburns we know so well. It’s a laugh for them because they only know him from the comics – a legend, a wraith in yellow panties and Astro Boy hairstyle; and it’s a laugh for us – to at last recognize our berserker hero, wolfen ‘do and pumped in fury as he locomotives headlong into his final battle.

Wolverine, the Marvel superhero character created in 1974, will surely be back on the silver screen, in another incarnation in an alternate future, although I doubt anyone will inhabit the role as legitimately as Jackman. Seeing him bid goodbye to the character is as saddening as if the character is dying for good. For no matter the younger actors that will don the sideburns henceforth, no matter the swankier production values, the poutier muscles, the funkier hairdo, the grander adventures – this iteration of Wolverine is lost to us forever.

LOGAN is like a ménage a trois between SHANE, TRUE GRIT and UNFORGIVEN, but mostly TRUE GRIT (a hardened gunslinger protecting his young charge, no matter the cost), not SHANE (a hired gun helping landowners, with a young boy on the periphery of the story), even though Laura and Xavier watch the latter in a hotel room, Shane’s dialogue neatly summing up Logan’s regrets, “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one.” (In the final scene, Laura repeats Shane’s words verbatim, that he utters to the strange mannequin boy, about “running home to mother.”)

The theme of every killing taking its toll is presupposing you have a conscience. Though Logan has a conscience, Laura does not. She has been raised as a sociopath, so Shane’s words do not hold any resonance for her, even though the filmmakers (writers Scott Frank, Michael Green and James Mangold, also director) would like to believe they are emulating an old time classic.

Many were disappointed in Wolverine’s first solo outing, 2009’s overwrought X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (directed by Gavin Hood), but the film was not bad – it just lacked the gravitas we expected from a character so damaged and dark; then James Mangold’s THE WOLVERINE (2013) was praised for “getting it right,” even though in retrospect, we realize that film only retained the character names from Wolverine’s first intensely psychological solo adventure and none of the gravitas. Now, Mangold sharpens his claws and actually does snikt it out of the park with LOGAN. Gravitas an’ all.

X-eunt in X-cellence.

END