This Is Not Your Typical Superhero Movie

After 17 years as Wolverine, Hugh Jackman is apparently calling it quits. If so, critics love his finale. In Logan, Wolverine believes himself to be one of the world's last remaining mutants. Then he meets a mute girl with claws just like him. Here's what critics are saying:

• At the AP, Sandy Cohen explains this is not your typical superhero movie: It's R-rated, darker and grittier than most, and "packs an emotional wallop." But Cohen is not complaining. "If this is indeed Jackman's last Wolverine film, he's going out in heartfelt, high-class style," and perhaps leaving his legacy in the capable hands of 11-year-old Dafne Keen, whose "fight scenes are as thrilling and bloodletting as any of Wolverine's."
• "It's a Marvel" with "the kind of topical frisson and intensity that The Dark Knight had nine years ago, and no superhero movie has enjoyed since," Chris Klimek writes at NPR. Jackman is "tremendous," while the film as a whole restores lost "integrity and emotion" to the series, he writes. "Subtle? No. Powerful? Just you wait, Bub."

• Adam Graham wasn't quite as taken with it. "While Logan has a soul, it doesn't have the heft it thinks it does," he writes at Detroit News. He wasn't a fan of the "cloyingly sentimental story," but he says the film still packs "a solid punch." Jackman, meanwhile, is "Clint Eastwood-esque," he writes. "Wolverine's claws may be rusty and covered in dried blood, but they're still sharp."
• Barry Hertz says there's too much blood handled "with too much glee," but that's his only major critique at the Globe and Mail. Director James Mangold "mostly lets Logan stand as a showcase for Jackman" and he "nails it … adding an impressive, complex weight" to his character. In fact, Logan makes it "almost painful to say goodbye, which is precisely the point."

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