EXIT CLAWS

Opening this week: 

Logan— The Marvel superhero Wolverine, a Canadian mutant with regenerative powers verging on invincibility and long, claw-like blades he can distend from his knuckles, has been around in the comics since the ‘70s. He’s been played in the movies by Hugh Jackman since 2000, and this latest, which goes by his walking-around name of Logan, is said to be Jackman’s last.

This one finds Logan, haggard and careworn, working anonymously as a chauffer in a U.S./Mexico border town and supporting the dementia-afflicted Professor X (Patrick Stewart). The two men become guardians of Laura (Dafne Keen), a little girl with mutant powers remarkably similar to Logan’s, right down to the claws and the tendency to use them. Soon they’re all on the run from corporate forces led by a drawlingly evil security chief (Boyd Holbrook) and a mad scientist (Richard E. Grant).

The director is James Mangold, who previously helmed The Wolverine in 2013, and whose earlier movies include the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma and 1997’s High Noon-ish police drama Cop Land. His work often shows the influence of the classic westerns—the underdog facing powerful enemies with moral rectitude on his side. With Logan, Mangold overtly indentifies his hero with the title character in Shane, but he also infuses a strong, even heavy-handed streak of religious allegory into the story—this is Shane meets The Last Temptation of Christ. With extendable claws.

Mangold creates an atmosphere of dusty, ochre-toned defeat, and the actors match it. Jackman may never have done better work onscreen than this portrait of grudging, exhausted compassion, and Stewart’s enfeebled warmth is touching. Both have a rapport with silent, spooky Dafne Keen. Among the supporting cast, both Stephen Merchant as Caliban, a sort of mutant-bloodhound who has become Professor X’s caregiver, and Elizabeth Rodriguez as a desperate nurse add to the movie’s tragic flavor.

As with the other Wolverine flicks, I greatly enjoyed this gritty, gripping, melancholy chase picture, even though I was never a devotee of these comics. Be forewarned, though: With severed limbs and heads and bloody shootings and impaled henchmen from beginning to end, Logan is probably the most gory superhero movie I’ve ever seen (though I missed last year’s notorious Deadpool).

Despite this splatter, I was prepared to appreciate any superhero flick that didn’t climax with a bunch of skyscrapers collapsing into rubble, not to mention any movie that closes with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around,” in its entirety, under the end credits. With superhero flicks, one should never assume anything is final, but if this truly is Jackman’s farewell to the role, then Cash gives him the perfect swansong.

SKIN MEN & TIN MEN

Opening this weekend:

Green Room—The Ain’t Rights, a down-and-out punk band on a broke, exhausted, gasoline-siphoning tour, lines up a dodgy gig at an isolated club in the Pacific Northwest. The place turns out to be a hive of skinheads and neo-Nazis, but they play their set, get paid and are in the midst of getting the hell away when one of the band members goes back into the green room to retrieve a forgotten cell phone and sees…well, let’s just say something that very definitely ain’t right.

From there on, The Ain’t Rights are besieged by the scumbags, who are determined not to let them leave after what they’ve witnessed. Eventually the club’s owner (Patrick Stewart) shows up, and starts plotting the band’s elimination in earnest.

This very violent, gory shocker has a terrifying plausibility, especially in its first half. We can see from the start that these idiots are in trouble, but we glimpse the overt mayhem they’ve blundered upon elliptically, and the response of their skinhead hosts to the situation feels real.

These aren’t a bunch of hyper-confident professional villains, like in a Die Hard movie—they’re scared too, and unsure about what to do next, and also on the stupid side, a deeply dangerous combination. Patrick Stewart hits just the right, loathsomely believable note as the harried proprietor frantic to protect a secret; it’s pretty clear that he uses Nazi ideology as a business tactic to maintain employee loyalty and retention.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, of the excellent 2013 noir Blue Ruin, obviously had a bigger budget this time, as he could afford Stewart, as well as Anton Yelchin as the most reflective of The Ain’t Rights. He’s a smashing talent, though Green Room, like Blue Ruin, is stronger and more excruciatingly tense in its first half than its second. Sauliner seems to have a weakness for runaway bloody carnage and body counts that verge on comicality, perhaps intentionally.

The Jacobean final quarter of Green Room seems meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, and if so this may show Saulnier’s shrewdness. Had he maintained the same atmosphere of doom and desperation, unvaried and unrelenting, for the whole movie’s length, Green Room might have been more convincing and harrowing, but it wouldn’t be such good nasty fun. Which, if you’re not too squeamish, is what it is.

 
Ratchet & Clank—Ratchet is a “lombax,” sort of a cat-like creature with ears like a fennec fox and a talent for mechanics, while Clank is his small robot pal. Their interplanetary adventures have, I understand, been popular among video gamers for more than a decade, so now they’re getting the computer-animated feature treatment.

I hadn’t heard of the game, so I’m in no position to comment on how the movie compares to it. On its own merits, however, I found it pretty slow and by-the-numbers, and its attempts at knowing humor mostly fall flat. On the other hand, it’s visually strong, with some pretty cool robot and alien designs.

Ratchet, voiced by James Alan Taylor, is a drearily standard yearning-for-glory underdog hero obligatory for this sort of film. The movie’s best element is Clank (David Kaye), a very polite and endearing robot. Had it simply been called Clank, it might have been livelier.

OZZZZZZZZZ...

The opening credits of Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return appear on debris flung at us from a twister. The objects on which we see the names are reflective of the person’s contribution—the name of Hugh Dancy, for instance, who provides the voice of “Marshal Mallow,” is emblazoned on a bag of marshmallows.

That’s sort of clever. And there are a couple of amusing passages in this computer-animated musical adventure. Probably the best is the episode set in the Dainty China Country, beyond the “Great Wall of China”—a fortification made up of huge teacups, saucers, etc, protecting a population of animate China figurines and ruled over by the China Princess, voiced by Megan Hilty.

She’s a bit of a diva, but not a bad sort, and Marshal Mallow, a courtly military type, falls for her. His body being made entirely of marshmallows, he’s a good match for such a fragile lady.

The movie also offers a reasonably lively climactic battle, with Dorothy (Lea Michele) and Toto, re-summoned from Kansas, and their allies, against The Jester, the younger brother of the Wicked Witch of the West, who's cursed to wear the coxcomb forever. Martin Short lends this villain his voice, and the rest of the cast is equally impressive: Dan Aykroyd as the Scarecrow, James Belushi as the no-longer-cowardly Lion, Kelsey Grammer as the The Tin Man and Bernadette Peters as Glinda, with Oliver Platt, Brian Blessed and even Patrick Stewart in secondary roles.

Sadly all these great voices are given little to say, or sing, that’s witty or engaging. The aforementioned whimsical ideas notwithstanding, the film, adapted from a book by Roger Stanton Baum (L. Frank’s great-grandson) is mostly a flat, sluggish dud, weighed down with obligatory elements and forgettable songs—some of them co-written by Bryan Adams.

The movie has visual downsides, too. The fantasy characters aren’t bad, but the human characters represent CGI at its most charmless and creepy—the notorious “Uncanny Valley effect” at its worst. Dorothy, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and their Kansan neighbors come across like CPR training dummies.

Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is a painful example of the unreliability of the “dream team” approach to moviemaking: of how a well-funded, well-intentioned project stuffed with big name talent can stubbornly refuse to come to life. If it’s the only option to take your kids to at a discount theatre on a really boring afternoon, maybe you might consider it. Maybe. But you may find it has the same effect on you as the poppies outside the Emerald City.

RIP to Al Feldstein, editor of MAD Magazine in its greatest vintages and thus arguably the architect of a generation of insufferable adolescent smartasses, passed on at 88.