Boar (2017)

Movie titles can be confusing sometimes, as to what they’re about. Sometimes, you just don’t know for sure. For instance, this one is about a giant boar that murders people in the outback.

Director: Chris Sun

Starring: Nathan Jones, Bill Moseley, the fucking boar

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Boar is an Australian horror film starring Australian power lifter and wrestler Nathan Jones, who wins the contest for the man I’d be most afraid of if he ever turned evil and decided to start murdering people. Seriously; dude’s the size of the fucking Incredible Hulk. Bill Moseley, of Texas Chainsaw and Devil’s Reject’s fame, also has a role, although this is perhaps the only movie he’s done where he isn’t a raging psychotic, so you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the man.

But the real star is the boar, of course! He wastes no time at all doing what boars do best: stealthily rampaging through the night like a vampire and massacring unsuspecting tourists. Did you know that boars can basically just appear and disappear at will, like ninjas? They’re really hard to hear and see, even when they’re gigantic like the one in this movie.

The movie is essentially a slasher film where the killer is a boar. It’s like if Jason Voorhees was a boar, which was always my main issue with those movies. The story moves through a series of characters with rich and complex backstories. Like, there’s a guy and a girl in a tent fucking! And another guy and a girl telling scary stories in the woods and he tells her to shut the fuck up a few times! It’s rich stuff. Compelling narratives, you see.

There are some other things that happen, such as two crazy old guys who wander around talking about stuff and who smartly split up to go look for the boar. Splitting up is a tried and true tradition in horror movies, and anybody who’s anybody does it immediately. It’s the mark of the high-born in a horror movie. One of them even finds one of the girls who previously got gored by the boar. Instead of helping her, he kind of dawdles around as he looks for the boar, which kills him!

Man, this boar is way smarter than most of the people around here. I think that’s why it’s so angry. It’s so easy to kill these people that he’s just crying out for a real challenge. But alas, none come. The boar stands alone as the apex predator of the world. The most dangerous of all God’s unholy creations...

The movie isn’t just about boar killing though. It has depth. It’s got other stuff happening, like the day to day life of a regular Australian bar and its patrons. This tough chick working behind the bar gets to beat up a guy being a creep. Then later on there’s a long sequence of this old man going on and on about how he saw the boar at the bar, with nobody believing him. It takes up a lot of time. My theory is, this guy was terminally ill and just wanted for once in his life to act in a movie. So kudos to Boar for letting him really go for it!

Meanwhile Bill Moseley’s character and his daughter’s boyfriend wander around as Moseley tries to convince the boyfriend guy that marrying his daughter is gonna be tough and he really has to think about it. Moseley, who’s been married three times, says he’s the poster child for what not to do. Man, who knew a movie called Boar would be raising some serious and deep questions about the nature of relationships. Like, are we ever really ready to get married? Are we prone as a species to rushing things, sadomasochistically running headlong into pain, knowing we’re only likely to end up disappointed? All questions the movie wants us to consider here. Very deep stuff.

That all comes to an end, though, when they come across the boar! They’re probably the only characters in this whole fucking movie to actually see this thing. That still doesn’t stop it from ripping off Moseley’s head like he’s a rag doll. Oh well, at least the boyfriend doesn’t have to worry about Moseley being up his ass about the marriage thing anymore!

Well, actually he too only survives a few more minutes. He comes back to the family and tries to tell them what happened, only then the boar lunges out from nowhere and gores him too. IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT. Even pre-schoolers would be able to see a giant murderous boar hurtling toward them. Blind people would at least hear it and be like, oh damn, I better move out of the way. Don’t give me any excuses like ‘oh, the characters here were on vacation, their guard was down’ - they should’ve seen the fucking thing!

I guess what happens next is a lot of running around in the dark. Nathan Jones’ character Bernie is able to fight the boar until it gores him and leaves him for dead, though because his body is apparently immortal Superman-like stuff, he survives and comes back later. The boar is actually killed by the chick from the bar from earlier. I guess bartenders really are the most badass people in society. She can kick the asses of random weirdos trying to grope her in the bar, and also murderous boars. Do not fuck with the bartenders!

Well that was Boar. It had a little bit of everything, from horrific violence to charming family tales and even some moral dilemmas. All in all, a well-rounded movie for the discerning film goer. Check it out!

Images copyright of their original owners, I don't own them.

47 Meters Down (2017)

47 Meters Down is yet another 'shark horror movie,' and I should be annoyed with them by now. But honestly, there's something strangely endearing about the optimism here, of people thinking they can still do better than Jaws after all these years without massively changing up the formula.

To be fair, this does offer a different take on a shark movie. In this one, they're trapped underwater in a shark cage and are running out of oxygen surrounded by bloodthirsty, serial-killer-ish sharks, each ready to devour them whole. But strangely, they barely even do too much with THAT concept. It's a weird waste of potential. "Here's an original idea," I can imagine these writers saying, "now, just fart out a script. I am gonna take a nap."

Director: Johannes Roberts

Starring: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This starts off with our main characters Kate and Lisa, on vacation at a ritzy, gorgeous looking beach in Mexico. There are several pointless but nice-looking scenes that end very quickly, looking less like a horror movie and more like a travel agency's commercial. Or a hotel's commercial. Whatever it is, you know looking like a commercial is very much against what most horror movies should be about. Hint, guys – they're supposed to make you want to stay AWAY from places.

I guess we find out that Lisa's long-term boyfriend Stuart has just dumped her and that's at least partly why they're vacationing. They talk about how he got bored and left... I guess he had the attention span of a tiny baby. Did you try waving car keys in front of his face? Also, it's weird that they have all these short, pointless scenes and are just now dumping this on us. What prevented them from just opening with it? Maybe the contract for the cinematographer included 'must film footage that looks identical to a travel commercial in case this horror movie thing doesn't work out.'

Then they meet some guys late at night at a bar, partying and stuff, and the guys invite them to go shark diving the next day. As far as the movie shows, they barely exchange two words before agreeing to this. Later on, we see that Kate, the younger sister, is super adventurous and has a penchant for doing crazy stuff. I guess in this movie, that means she just agrees to whatever the weird guys in the bar invite her to do. Good thing she didn't talk to the OTHER guy at that bar who wanted her to play Russian Roulette. Or the third guy who was just a fucking rapist.

The next day they all go do exactly that, shark diving. There are a few scenes where the crew on the boat seems slightly suspicious and weird, like maybe they'll do something creepy and horror movie-ish. Nope. It's just a normal shark diving trip, with all the lack of regulations or rules that an off-the-beaten-path beach in Mexico promises... this movie just has such a lack of any imagination. It's barely even trying to tell a story. We were just waiting for something super creepy to happen, like right before the girls went under, one of the guys leans over and whispers that they've been stalking the girls for weeks. But nope. I guess that was too much to ask. Or, really, anything remotely interesting.

I'll throw the movie a bone here: it's pretty cool when they actually get underwater. It's a dark, isolated and gloomy setting. There isn't much else quite like it for horror. Most movies would wimp out and set a lot of it above the water, but this one, to what little credit I can give it, creates a definite mood by setting the entirety of the movie way deep down underwater.

Too bad they barely make use of it! There's very little in the way of scares. Most of this is just them talking in frantic tones about how to escape. There's a few scenes of very mild suspense that might make a nursing home grandma who's never seen a horror movie jump. Otherwise it's all a big old flatline. Like oh, really, they want to get out of the ocean? Tell us more, Shakespeare. Regale us with these mindblowing concepts.

They don't utilize the setting very well and there's maybe one scene where they go off and explore the darker parts of the ocean in any way. The sharks are bad at being serial killers and don't sneak up on them well or provide much tension either. Maybe they should've looked this up on WikiHow. Overall this is a limp tension-free slog much like the feeling of a deflated balloon.

They start running out of oxygen, though much later than I had thought. They get in touch with the douchebag who got them down there to begin with, who sends down some new tanks. The problem is, because they've been down there so long, they might start to hallucinate. Now, this was the point where I thought things might finally get cool and interesting. Here was an opportunity for the movie to truly show off its creativity and put in some badass, insane hallucinations under the fucking water...

Nope! That doesn't happen. Instead, Kate gets attacked by a shark and then Lisa manages to get free from the bars of the cage pinning her leg down and save Kate. Then the both of them ascend from the water on their own – which was really an option the whole time and I'm not sure why they didn't just try it even in spite of the danger...

...then it turns out all of THAT was all a hallucination and they WEREN'T saved! But don't worry, the national guard was coming down right at that time and saves them for really real.

Wow. That is some weak ass “horror.” You had the option to have fucking hallucinations under water and you did jack squat with it. This should have been a fucking freak circus like the climax of The Shining set underwater, with hallucinations used to their full effect and escalating until the characters lost their mind. I wanted to see the darkest recesses of their psychology. I wanted to see gore-streaked apparitions and creepy figures lurking in the shadows of the sea.

But nope. Nothing. There's no imagination here. This kind of stuff is the reason why nobody ever took horror seriously for years in the 2000s. All in all, I recommend just going diving in open water with sharks rather than watching this silly stuff. I'm gonna go watch Jaws again instead.

Image copyright of its original owners, we don't own it.

The Post (2017)

The Post is a well made movie – I don't think anyone's disputing that. Steven Spielberg is a veteran and he obviously had shit to say here... from the commentary on the current Trump administration, in the way the movie talks about Nixon in the 70s, and in the feminist leanings as it has Meryl Streep buck the patriarchal system that condescends to her. These things are timely in the context of today's news, while also being a part of the straight historical tale Spielberg is telling.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks

IMDb

But I just wish it was more exciting as a film. This is about as ramrod-stiff as a movie can be, and while it tells the events of the infamous Pentagon Papers in a well-directed way that moves the story along, I just couldn't really bring myself to be truly excited. I'm a journalist myself, so I enjoyed the rah-rah nature and the fuck-you to the establishment trying to suppress the First Amendment. All of that was kinda cool, albeit predictable.

The whole thing just ends up feeling so rote. You might as well just make a conveyor belt with every Oscar-baiting trope in existence. Despite its professional sheen and the talented actors, you get everything I always see in these historical biopics and true-life type films... there are enough dramatic 'fuck you' speeches in this, and enough Eureka moments and shocked faces when something Big and Important happens, that I pretty much knew when it was about to happen next. Every dialogue has to be some monologue that's important and has all this real world meaning and gravitas. I just think it gets a bit boring after a while. Yeah I enjoy seeing them the first time, maybe the second time – but does every bit of dialogue have to be something you wrote while fantasizing about an Oscar for Best Script? If people talked like this in real life, we'd never enjoy conversations again. We'd be rolling our eyes so much that people would think we were imitating The Exorcist.

It just seems like a common trap these movies fall into. I also saw Trumbo the other day, which was similarly stiff in a way – though bolstered by an incredible Bryan Cranston performance. But in the same way, all the dialogue and scenes started to feel very rote and by the book. It's a cheap shot to say that we know things will work out in the end for these courageous rebels in these films, because then why make any movie if you're not going to round out a story well? It wouldn't be as good if they failed in Trumbo and every writer got blacklisted forever. Or if, in The Post, they altered history and Nixon crushed the First Amendment under his boot. That would be weird. Though maybe it would at least be funny if nothing else, to go in expecting the usual happy, historically accurate ending, and then get a twist like that – I'd find that oddly humorous anyway.

I guess all I'm saying is that these movies just all feel the same. They all follow a formula – a historic tale woven into a simplified Rebels Take On The Empire type of story, with a seemingly choreographed amount of Big Speeches and dramatic, hushed silences playing out over two hours before we get a scene of everyone hugging and cheering when it all works out. It's like Mad Libs with big budget Hollywood scripts.

I'm not saying these movies are bad – they're OK at best. They are the vanilla ice cream of movies. Safe and dependable and not really all that challenging. And I give The Post credit for trying to tie in some current themes to a historic context, which made it a bit more flavorful at parts. But it wasn't enough. I just didn't find it that exciting. Recommended if you want something to watch with your grandma's book club I guess?

The Disappointments and Worst Movies of 2017

Well, it's that time of year again - when we pass the Godlike judgment on the movies of last year, as if random bloggers' opinions somehow mean everything. But really, none of this truly means anything - it's just the opinions I had all year, and hopefully you'll glean some cathartic entertainment out of this list, if nothing else.

First up is disappointments. There were just a couple of movies this year that I wanted to be good but they didn't live up to what I'd hoped.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Thor: Ragnarok

This wasn't bad, and when it focused on the lead characters bantering and riffing off one another, it was quite fun – director Taika Waititi is good at that sort of thing. But it also had a super generic villain and serious side of the plot. This shit was like someone thought we'd never heard of Hamlet or something. Sorry – I need more than that.

Blade Runner 2049

I really wanted to love this, as Denis Villenueve is my favorite modern director and I've only recently fully “gotten” the original Blade Runner. But this was a lot of gorgeous visuals in service to a boring story that didn't really expand upon anything the original did – 30 years and all we got was a slightly scrambled rehash of themes from that movie. A dull performance by Ryan Gosling doesn't help.

And now the worst of the year - holy shit, there are way more than usual. What a year. Let's not waste any time and just get into this right now!

MY WORST MOVIES OF 2017

9. A Cure for Wellness

A truly ridiculous movie that, in spite of its exciting scenes, is entertaining mostly for how dumb it is and how unbelievable every choice the characters make. It goes on too long and just gets worse as it does so. You'll be tearing out your hair at why the main characters don't just leave this insane asylum – because, of course, there wouldn't be a movie otherwise. The ending twist was probably the worst, but the whole thing is a ghoulish slice of over-done cheese.

8. Mother!

I felt odd about putting this very artsy film from director Darren Aronofsky on a list with some of the rest of this – unlike some of these, this had a clear ambition and was trying to accomplish things. But for me this just didn't work. It treated its characters as chess pieces in service to an allegory, and there just wasn't any real humanity in this, no true complexity. After its two hour runtime was done I felt like I had just been preached to rather than entertained.

7. The Bye Bye Man

A basically objectively awful horror film, hitting every box of cliché and bad writing you'd expect. Like a mutant spawn of every piece of trash I ever reviewed. So bad it's almost funny but is then just bad again.

6. Split

People praised this M. Night Shyamalan vehicle for not being as bad as some other Shyamalan travesties in recent years, but rest assured I am here to tell you he's still a complete fucking hack.

5. Free Fire

Like last year's Hardcore Henry, this was a completely vapid and soul-sucking movie that asked the question 'what if we removed all plot from an action movie and just gave you the shooting scenes?' The answer is that you get an unwatchable movie.

4. Downsizing

I reviewed this a few weeks ago, so go check that out – but this was an infuriatingly pretentious, directionless mess, and director Alexander Payne seems to have completely stepped out of his comfort zone... too far, even. To the point where he's risking being eaten by wolves out there. He should come back to his comfort zone.

3. Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Dead Men Tell No Tales

This was a completely soulless Product™ of a movie, and every choice just seemed to be made to pander to the dumbest levels of the audience. There was nothing about this that was funny or exciting in any way. Johnny Depp is superbly annoying.

2. Justice League

Another movie that exists purely as soulless corporate Product™. Basically Zack Snyder playing with action figures again. An enervated, generic plot and bad characters make this a true slog to get through, and even the action gets boring. Pretty much every single thing about this was mediocre and all of them combined make the movie horrible.

1. Alien Covenant

This just sucks hard. A superbly dumb plot that manages to both rip off the original and be stupid in its own way, which is pretty amazing... this is the worst movie of the year simply because it had nothing redeeming about it, and every single choice made contributed to its horrendous, hacky quality. This is just the pits and I hate it. So it is the worst of this year for me.

Well, that's the 'worst' out of the way - and now we can move on to the best movies of the year, as it's usually better to end on a good note, after all...

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Death Note (2017)

Death Note is a new adaptation of a well-liked anime series from Japan, based on the premise of a book that kills anyone whose name you write in it, and also that the two smartest people in the world just happen to be Japanese teenagers. Though here, it's done in English and with all American actors in an American high school setting.

As you all know, anime fans traditionally love it when American directors put a bunch of loud white kids in adaptations of their favorite things, so I'm sure this went over really well. Let me check the internet comments and reactions to this and I'll get back to you!

Director: Adam Wingard

Starring: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Okay, it turns out I was wrong and a lot of people really hate it – and for a lot more reasons than the generalization I just made in the first paragraph. I sure didn't know that before sitting down to do a review of it!

This thing starts off with a normal American high school, with people cheerleading and playing football while a sappy alt rock song whines over-top. It's not really all that befitting of this story.

How did the anime start again?

Huh. A bit different, then. But I am not one to dwell on petty differences. Let's move on to extreme differences, like main character Light, now played by Nat Wolff of Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. Those were great films and he's a very promising actor – who also happens to be completely unfitting for this role.

I mean, he just isn't at all what this character should have been. I wouldn't be complaining that much if it was a well-written role, but instead of the cunning mastermind of the original series, he kinda acts like a character out of a Judd Apatow film. He's just kind of a bumbling goofball, and doesn't come off as terribly smart or interesting in any way. One of the first scenes is of him getting in a fight to defend this girl from bullies, and then the school rewards him for that by giving him detention for having a bunch of papers he was writing for other kids in his backpack. Some people just have no chill.

Then he finds the Death Note, the magic book that lets him kill whoever he wants as long as he writes down their name while thinking about their face. Gee. Hope he doesn't mistake this for a diary and write about any crushes of his, right? That would be a real fuck up. Apparently there are like 100 different “rules” in the Death Note, which must be boring as fuck to read. I mean, I'm surprised Light just doesn't skim through it in a “TL, DR” way. Why don't the Death Note makers just put it in Instagram form instead? That would truly reach the millennial generation.

ZZZZzzzzZZZZZ...

The death god Ryuk then appears in the school, the only supernatural being that looks exactly like Willem Dafoe. I find it funny that Dafoe voiced this character and did not act as him – considering Ryuk is one of the only characters in existence, along with the Green Goblin, seemingly written specifically with Dafoe's distinctive face in mind.

Dafoe was too talented to actually appear in the movie.

This causes Light to scream like a little girl and hide underneath a desk for a scene that goes on quite a long time for a movie that seems to want this character to be cool or badass. Not really a great way to show THAT...

I guess he to write down the name of this idiot bully at school, having him decapitated by a ladder that falls off a truck after a crash – did we just slip into a Final Destination movie?

At home, Light gets into a totally natural and realistic conversation with his father, who is a cop. They talk about how Light's mom was killed by a random mafia gangster type of guy at some time in the past, because that happens all the fucking time in America in the modern day.

Then of course there's that old cliché family drama that only happens when a gangster kills your mom – there are no other ways to create authentic drama between family members, after all. I hope you liked this bit of pointlessly transparent exposition – because it won't lead to any meaningful character development. Light has the gangster guy killed off a few minutes later in a horribly violent way while eating dinner at a fancy restaurant. Glad this was in the movie at all!

The dad comes to see him a few minutes later, barging into the room without warning, and it's like geez Dad, I could've been either masturbating OR writing in a death book in here, don't you know the meaning of privacy?

The next day he decides to tell this hot chick he likes, Mia, about the Death Note and how he can kill people with it. He's lucky she is absolutely batshit insane and sociopathic. Most girls would have walked the other way, but due to the lazy writing, she's a crazy girl and wants to kill people too – and also apparently has no problem with Light talking to an invisible death god. He sure got lucky with this one.

I guess after this, the movie turns into Natural Born Killers for idiots, with the two of them scheming and plotting and killing a bunch of bad guys all over the world. Honestly, this is where the movie lost us – do these kids really seem like the types to care about bad guys all over the world? Do they even seem organized enough to pull that off? They seem to me more like they'd be sitting behind the gym smoking weed than anything else.

"Hey, want to make out while listening to My Chemical Romance albums?"
"Sure..."

I guess Light's dad gets pulled into the investigation, because why wouldn't a random city police detective be working on a worldwide mass-murder investigation? It just makes sense. There's a few other characters introduced, like L, a super detective mastermind who is hell-bent on catching Light because... I guess he has nothing better to do. There's also his right hand man Watari, who gives out business cards with nothing but his own name on them:

Yup. No contact information. No description of what services he offers. No titles... just a name. That's all this guy needs because he is super cool.

L is a weird, quirky detective who has oddball mannerisms, and he's actually pretty cool for the most part – until Light mind-controls Watari to go find his name. This leads Watari to go to a random house in the middle of the woods, where L was once an orphan trained to be a master detective there. If this is all sounding like drunk mad libs for a parody of a crime thriller on South Park or some shit, well, that's because it very well could be. Except here there's no self awareness. Actor Lakeith Stanfield, playing L, is actually very good, and I hope he gets into more things that utilize his talents better than this mess.

More press conferences should be given by weird ninjas with the American flag behind them.

Except, uh oh, it turns out Mia has gone rogue and wants to keep killing, so she just lets him die by hails of gunfire, I guess! This is really the conflict in the last half, Light and Mia now against each other. It isn't done terribly well – but we'll get back to that in a minute.

For now, let's just check out the super long-ass chase scene between L and Light, which has finally boiled over into the proper action-movie stylings that a story about a teenager getting a notebook that kills people deserves. I'm amazed at how long this chase scene goes. Marathon runners wouldn't be able to do this shit – Usain Bolt would be tapping out for a break at some point. These guys, who spend most of the movie sitting down, are now apparently amazing athletes!

But that isn't really the point of the climax here. The climax gets to a head when Light meets Mia in this random ferris wheel at the dock, and the two fight it out over who's really going to get the book. This results in a comically over the top fight between them that really just sounds like any other teenage couple fight. I fondly remember fighting with my high school girlfriend over who was going to kill people more efficiently. It's totally ridiculous and almost impossible to take seriously as any kind of drama.

I suppose their fight was so ridiculous and terrible that it actually breaks the wheel down and causes it to fall – Mia to her death, I guess, and Light to hospitalization.

I guess, in one of the only moments in the film that actually recalls the source material, Light has actually masterminded everything so he could keep control of the Death Note, even going so far as to get some other guy to write names in it for him while he's in the hospital! Wow! Now that's a message in this fucking movie I can get behind finally – get somebody else to do the hard work for you.

So, yeah... it sucked. Bad writing, no clear character motivations, characters that seemed to change through the film purely at the whim of how smart the writing dictated them to be, and a lot of quite funny attempts at drama. This is just a bad movie. I guess I've seen worse? I mean, if that's a positive for you, that worse movies than this exist. But if you're looking for a good movie, look elsewhere.

And if you're looking for a good anime adaptation, uh, maybe stay far away from this, as if it were some Chernobyl-radioactive piece of cinema threatening to deform you and make you sterile. I don't get how these directors keep fucking up these anime movies. It'd be one thing if they made good films that were just different, but this kind of goofy shit is just bizarre – anime is from a different culture and maybe we just shouldn't try. It's OK to admit something is just different from your own world-view or culture - you don't have to fucking remake every single thing, you know.

But who am I kidding? I'm just screaming in the wind here. They're gonna keep making them.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Cinema Freaks Live: A Ghost Story (2017)

Here's our Cinema Freaks Live video for the movie 'A Ghost Story.' I've been preoccupied with other things like the pursuit of money to pay bills and shit lately. So I hope this will tide people over. More reviews soon!

Cinema Freaks Live: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Colossal (2017)

There may be SPOILERS in this!

Logan (2017) and the Value of Quitting While Ahead

Here's the Cinema Freaks podcast (featuring myself and Tony) for the new movie Logan, in theaters now:

(SPOILERS in the video!)

By now you've likely seen Logan or at least heard about it and have plans to see it, so here's my take. This is one of the greatest superhero movies ever made. I don't think that's too hard a bar to clear – what else would make the cut? Superman from the 70s. The 1989 Burton Batman. The Dark Knight. Maybe a few others based on your personal taste, but I think this is pretty close to a prime cut for the genre that has grown out of being a niche and into a full-blown phenomenon as you can get.

People love superheroes, and this movie is basically for the people who were kids in the 80s and 90s and have now grown up – but still love their old favorite characters. Superheroes, like it or not, aren't just for kids anymore – geek culture has gone mainstream and those who liked this stuff when they were younger aren't letting it go, entranced as they are by the timeless stories and the iconoclastic characters. Logan the film is a dark, gritty, brutal and ultimately emotional and somber picture, and it's made from something that, in the 90s, was marked by pastel colored cartoon characters and colorful costumes fighting giant robots.

And yeah, I know that old show and the X-Men as a whole could be quite great at times before – I'm not saying it was just kiddie stuff. But Logan is another level – it's a superhero action film made with the class, artistry and style of an A-list drama. While it hits all the tropes you're familiar with, from a cross-country road trip chased by bad guys to a superpowered little girl and a reluctant hero, plus boatloads of cool action sequences fueled by superpowers, it does these things with a very serious temperament and a care for great cinematography and atmosphere more befitting of a No Country for Old Men-style dirge.

It's just really well done from a directing point of view, made whole by powerful performances from leads Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. We've seen this kind of stuff before – old men reckoning the ends of their lives, regrets buried deep coming to the surface, an obligation to do what's right even in the face of the desire to just crawl into a dark bar and stay there. But Jackman and Stewart, framed by a vague story of horrible happenings years ago in which most other mutants like them died apparently, make the story visceral and intense. The story is tried and true, but what's new about it is how well it is done.

I like that you get so little of the backstory behind this – the film takes place in 2029 and follows, as I said, an apparent tragedy that killed off most of the other mutants in the world. I like how vague that all is. Please, filmmakers, if you read my blog – don't make any prequels to this, nothing explaining how this came to pass. Also, if you read my blog, I'm sorry if I bashed any movie you made and you're now considering making prequels to Logan in spite of that.

But seriously – that also goes for the fact that Stewart and Jackman will reportedly not return for any more X-Men movies after this. I hope they stick to that as close as they can. I think there is a virtue in going out on top and not over-extending your welcome. Personally, I hate it when a series just drags on forever and loses the quality it once had, and I usually value a concise, beginning-and-ending story contained in one film over a never-ending sprawl of them. The story should end whenever it needs to, and if that takes three good films or only one, I personally like to see it end at that point – not just milked afterwards for money.

In this case, both Stewart and Jackman are going out on fucking top. There's nowhere else to really go from here. Logan is a wonderfully made, dark, harrowing and sad epic, but it's also a testament to the power of quitting while you're ahead. Here's to that.