$NAME(7) "$AUTHOR" "Violence and Swear Words"

The promise LOGAN makes with us is that it's more than just another
stupid superhero movie ratcheted up to an R rating, that it's a serious
film -- oh, there's Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" (drawing a perhaps
too-literal line to Logan's supposed self-destructive character),
there's the word "fuck" and "fucking," and right there in the first line
of the first scene too, and there are Logan's adamantium claws now
delivering on the threat to do some real bodily damage. THE A.V. CLUB
have protested that "LOGAN isn't like its peers, goddammit."[1] Except
that it is. It's the same juvenile stuff, but with an injection of
violence and swear words as a flimsy and insulting disguise as
seriousness.

In a perverse way, the added violence means LOGAN delivers exactly
what a certain subset of fans have wanted to see all along. It happens
in the first scene. The setup hits all the audience-identifiable
markers: our protagonist warns the unsuspecting wrongdoers that they
*really* don't want to do this, the wrongdoers react with arrogance and
aggression, and our protagonist is forced to counteract. The caveat is
that unlike his adversaries, Logan has superhuman healing powers, an
indestructible skeleton, and knives attached to his fists. The first
display of this greater might is slicing off a person's arm. Given the
thick redemption theme, you'd be forgiven for thinking Logan's
preference for 0-to-100 violence is a purposeful character flaw -- but
no, dividing people into multiple parts is his sole method of
problem-solving throughout the film.

Despite what I had read, there's no depth of character here, no
relationship driving the story, no redemption. The only evidence that
Logan is as self-destructive as the film keeps *telling* us he is, is
some heavy drinking. But his drinking never nudges the story one way or
the other, or impairs his ability to slice people up. Professor Xavier
rasps various platitudes to him, which constitutes their entire
relationship. A surrogate daughter/plot device arrives, but the film is
too pained at the prospect of drawing any relationship between her and
Logan, so keeps her literally mute for the majority.

I was so bored in LOGAN I had time to reflect on just what was going
wrong with adult action films. The best case for comparison I could
think of was TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY -- both films employ
established characters in a preexisting world, both are about those
characters facing their end of days, both play out against the American
desert as a kind of prelude to a reckoning, and both feature a man with
a metal skeleton protecting a child.

T2 is unmistakably a serious film, but its approach to violence is
very different. While our good-guy Terminator rolls some people about,
an intervention from John Connor prevents him from ever killing anyone.
Sarah Connor too, who competes with the Terminator for coldness, when
faced with the utilitarian trolley problem -- avert Judgement Day by
sacrificing one man's life -- can't pull the trigger. This is a moment I
remember thinking as a child, *just shoot him*, but as an adult it
leaves a lump in my throat: it is difficult to remain moral, and
difficult not to.

Instead, the violence in T2 is largely perpetrated by the T-1000. The
moments the film dwells on its violence derive from the way in which
this antagonist combines machine dispassion for killing people (and
dogs) and AI inquisitiveness for how to kill to his best advantage. His
advance is like a Google algorithm; the evil in both the machine and in
the programmer of the machine.

However, in LOGAN, our protagonist perpetrates the overwhelming
majority of on-screen violence. Which isn't exactly bad, but the film's
problem isn't that a superhero from our childhoods is severing limbs and
stabbing people through the head. It's that this ultra-violence is
presented as cartoon/comedic fun, not dissimilar to the slow-motion
bloodletting of KICK-ASS or ZOMBIELAND. Unlike with T2's adult
approach to violence, we're not supposed to condemn Logan's careless
attitude toward human life, we're supposed to revel in it -- each
graphic death is calibrated to make the man-children in the front row
squeal with delight -- and at the same time, we're supposed to laud this
as, finally, a story for grownups.

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[1] http://www.avclub.com/article/heres-why-logan-actually-doesnt-have-post-credits--251559