Logan

Wolverine’s valedictory places him in the mainstream of American mythology. He’s the gifted outlaw whose power is needed by the civilized society, so they can survive against less principled baddies. But his power and his accumulated guilt mean he can never settle down there. Society may sometimes need the gun but must shun it. NRA and puppet Trump take note.

That’s the great paradox that troubles America to this day. Civilization pretends to ban violence, but it needs to deploy it to survive. That point makes the classic frontier Western and its later sci-fi spinoff — the outer space frontier western — the primary American myth. In Logan two major quotations establish this theme. 

The end credits play over the old and gravely Johnny Cash’s song of the Day of Judgment, “Hurt.” Cash covered the hit by the — appropriate for this film — Nine Inch Nails. It was part of the ailing Cash’s own valedictory, his dark, melancholy, apocalyptic farewell to this world. 

Earlier, Charles and Laura watch Shane on tv. We see Jack Palance’s evil hired gun bait and slaughter a stupidly proud Southern sodbuster. Then Shane abandons his peacefulness to shoot down that and the other villains. Then Shane explains to young Joey why the gunslinger has to keep moving on. A man is what he is. That whole speech the little mutant girl heroine here recites over Wolverine’s grave. The acrobatic clawed Laura is a world away from her earlier counterpart, innocent Joey.  

Laura is one of the film’s most interesting twists in the Wolverine trilogy. She has been created from Wolverine’s DNA, so she’s had a kind off virgin birth from him. She has the pluck of the Nancy Drew school but the superhuman powers of Wonder Woman. Thus she tacitly personifies the feminist revolution. She proves most effective when she spurns dad’s orders. 

Unlike Shane, Wolverine shows very little attempts to be a man of peace. He’s introduced as hiding his superhuman powers behind the job of driving a rental limo. Like some Uber-mensch. His superpowers he calls a “poison” because it unleashes his animal nature, however virtuous his cause may be.  
     For all its violence and special effects, then, this shoot-n-slice-em-up is still a film of ideas and — in the final farewell — emotion. It’s incidentally a reminder of how dangerous and foolish Trump’s plan for replacing public education with a slew of special interest schools is. It's unnatural to isolate a group of students and narrow their education down to a single, debilitating focus.