Logan (2017)

Those who can stomach on-screen bloodshed will enjoy this X-Men installment in which Wolverine/Logan wants to retire but a terminally ill Professor Charles Xavier introduces him to a young mutant with the same powers. Hugh Jackman as Logan and Patrick Stewart as Xavier (last blogged in Chappie and X-Men: Days of Future Past, respectively), who have said they will not return for any sequels, turn in surprisingly good performances, as does Stephen Merchant (new to these pages, he's a co-creator of (and infrequent actor in) the original British The Office, and has done good work acting in the comedy series Extras (directed and wrote all 13 episodes) and Hello Ladies, to name a few) as Caliban. Stewart lost 21 pounds to play the frail professor, Jackman looks pretty beat up as the title character, though less so in the scenes where he (uncredited) plays Logan's clone, and Merchant, already tall and skinny, stoops over as the vulnerable albino.

Young Dafne Keen, in her screen debut, does quite well as mutant Laura and looks so much like Rooney Mara that casting agents should take note for future work. Boyd Holbrook (after I wrote about him in Higher Ground he was the leading good guy in Narcos) is scary bad guy Pierce and Richard E. Grant (after Filth & Wisdom he's done a lot of work, including series arcs on Girls and Downton Abbey) as a rational scientist (also a bad guy). Watch for the cameo by Elizabeth Rodriguez, whose 53 episodes of Orange Is the New Black (playing Aleida Diaz, Dayanara's mother) are all that I've noticed of her dozens of credits. 94 actors are listed on imdb.

Director/co-writer James Mangold directed and co-wrote Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Walk the Line (2005) and directed 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Co-writer Scott Frank co-wrote Little Man Tate (1991), Get Shorty (1995), Minority Report (2002), and The Lookout (2007), among others, as well as The Wolverine (2013) , which we didn't see. Fellow co-writer Michael Green wrote a bunch of TV shows and has two big sci-fi projects coming up: the sequels to Blade Runner and Alien.

Marco Beltrami's (most recently scored The Homesman) soundtrack can be streamed from this link. The score includes music played by on an instrument called the armonica (correctly spelled without an H) by Rutgers grad student Jake Schlaerth (watch the video here) and plenty of songs, listed here.

We were terribly disappointed not to see the usual Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel movie. Research after the fact shows that Lee is supposed to appear in the Deadpool 2 preview before the movie begins. However, the preview we saw on Friday was Lee-less, with Deadpool listening to Angel of the Morning on his headphones (here is the opening credit sequence--one of the best ever--for the first Deadpool (and here's my post on it)). I found Stan, though, in a longer Deadpool preview, entitled No Good Deed, but without the Angel. And the movie Logan has no post-credit bonus, either. What a world.

Among the 92 trivia items on imdb is the fact that this movie had the broadest release, at 4071 screens, for any R-rated movie in history. And lots of people liked it a lot, averaging 92% from critics and 94 from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Plenty of gore and plenty of entertainment.