With The Wolverine having delivered much more solid numbers and reviews than its predecessor, and with Deadpool having proved that R-rated comic book movies could sell, Fox were keen to secure a third solo Wolverine movie, with discussions beginning mere months after The Wolverine hit cinemas. With the license afforded by a darker direction and an allowance for gore and language, James Mangold elected to draw inspiration from the Old Man Logan comic book run in what everyone was very definite would be the final appearance for Jackman as the character. But could an R-Rated entry in the X-Men series proper really draw?

In 2029, mutants have ceased being born and their kind are slowly dying out, the X-Men a mere memory. Ageing and with his body slowly turning against him, Logan does his best to care for an Alzheimer’s-stricken and increasingly dangerous Charles Xavier. But the appearance of a woman asking for his help will have the Wolverine draw his claws in anger one more time.

I came to Logan late. When it showed in cinemas I simply didn’t have the time to see it, and then the more time went by without my having seen it, the less inclined I became to make the effort. I had vaguely enjoyed Origins back in the day, and The Wolverine was a workmanlike action flick, but I didn’t have the urgent need to see the trilogy closed. Oh boy, was I wrong.

You could probably fill thousands of pages with the praise that Logan has already received from fans and critics alike. It’s gritty, realistic, heartfelt and so on and so forth. However, what fascinates (and slightly annoys) me about Logan is the simple fact that it feels like the ending to a much better series of movies that I know now for a fact I will never get to see. That it doesn’t follow directly from its series predecessor isn’t a surprise – Mangold clearly didn’t feel particularly beholden to what had been done in Origins when he came on board for The Wolverine and that movie reflects this. Between that simple fact and the way in which Jackman’s version of the character had become almost a parodic box-ticking exercise for the wider franchise as it went on, it is not a surprise that Logan just goes its own way again.

Of course, that’s not to say that it’s divorced from the wider franchise – the end credits sting from Apocalypse is a direct lead in to its main plot point and there are other touches like the dusty samurai sword hanging in Logan’s home which ensure we know this is a part of the films which came before it. But setting the action so many years in the future and having us see the characters in such a different light really adds to a sense of dislocation.

There’s also the deliberate tonal shift from the Japanese-centric, samurai flavoured aesthetic of the previous movie and the focused, cowboy gunslinger vibe of this one. The film draws its inspiration from many a Western, notably Shane which the film goes so far as to have characters watching and one later quoting. Logan is the old gunslinger who’s retired, but who can’t quite escape from his old life, and must pick up his guns one more time to do the right thing. The movie’s Western influences bleed from every pore, from the way it is shot and lit to the score and locations.

Jackman, to his credit, really does manage to find a different side of Logan to present to us, albeit one still recognisable as the character we have spent the previous seventeen years getting to know. Gruff, bad-tempered and mean we all recognise. Old, worn out, sick and just trying to do one last good deed before he lays his weary bones to rest are all new. Every frame with Logan in it is painful to watch. Jackman makes us feel every impact, every bullet wound and every hacking, blood-flecked cough along the journey. This is a movie which seeks to address the ageing process, and what it makes of even the most larger then life of heroes. It’s a film in which Father Time is the only, inescapable winner.

Matching up perfectly to Jackman is Patrick Stewart’s final performance as Charles Xavier. It’s evident that Stewart had tremendous fun with the role, breaking away as it does from anything we have seen before. Like Jackman, Stewart makes the audience feel everything the professor goes through. One moment, there’s a tear in my eye as I see the broken-down shell this once great and hope-filled man has become. The next I’m giggling uncontrollably at a crotchety old man swearing and sticking his tongue out like a juvenile delinquent. Xavier’s final scene, talking to what he believes is Logan, is heartbreaking not just because you know what’s coming, but because it’s Charles finally remembering what Logan has been so desperately trying to make him forget. It’s a pitiful, horrific end to a beloved character, but it’s also a fitting one. It never feels gratuitous or overplayed, simply how this would happen in the real world.

But the real breakaway talent here is Dafne Keen as Logan’s ‘daughter’, Laura AKA X-23. It’s difficult to separate how much the reaction to her role was the result of genuine appreciation for the character and how much was simple bewilderment at seeing such a young actor in such a gruesome part. That said, Keen exhibits a natural talent and a charisma and screen presence one might expect in someone significantly older. It’s not just in the way that she acts, but everything about the performance – the way in which she carries herself and moves. The way in which she can hold the attention just with her stillness. Surrounded as she is by serious talent (including Richard E Grant himself), Keen is their equal in each and every scene. That she spends the majority of the film not even saying a single line of dialogue just adds to the achievement, and one can only assume big things in this young actress’s future.

Villain-wise, the movie doesn’t do much more than it absolutely has to. Boyd Holbrook has some fun and chews a little scenery as Donald Pierce, the bionic armed head of the ‘Reavers’ sent to track down Laura and her fellow mutants, but he’s never effectively more than a fairly generic bad guy. The aforementioned Richard E Grant similarly chows down on some scenery as Dr Zander Rice, the bad guy scientist responsible for creating Laura and the other mutant children as well as the Logan 2.0 which serves as the third super predictable antagonist. Backing these three up are a horde of disposable generic bad guys for Logan and Laura to carve their bloody way through. This is not a weakness but rather a deliberate narrative choice. As I’ve mentioned above, the main antagonist in this movie is time. Logan doesn’t need memorable villains to face off against, just enough villains that we can get the point that he really isn’t the man he used to be, and that his time is almost up.

Thematically, the screenplay treads a finely balanced line, putting enough into itself that it feels attached to the rest of the franchise but also taking the material darker than it’s ever been before. Mutants being hated and abused by society at large isn’t new. Incorporating actual X-Men comics into this continuity, as something in which people took the truth and then amplified and exaggerated it beyond recognition is an interesting step. Having a main plot point hinge on Laura’s conviction that a better place awaits her and her kind being based on a comic book story is a bold move. Having those co-ordinates, lifted straight from a comic page, be the place where her friends actually are waiting for her is verging on impudence, but also works. There’s a lesson at work here, and it isn’t the one the film knows we expect. Logan is the older, wiser version of himself who has seen a lot of death and tragedy. Of course we expect him to give his newly-revealed daughter a hard lesson in reality by proving her faith to be misguided naivety. Of course he’s going to take her there and show her that she’s wrong. Except he takes her there and she’s right. Logan’s the one being taught a lesson, and that lesson is simple – hope isn’t dead. It appears to be when Xavier dies, because that character’s defining trait has been hope and his clinging to it through various tribulations. The third act reveal that all the kids are there, waiting for everyone to arrive so they can cross the border, tells us that hope persists in the new generation.

Combine that with the simple truth that those kids escaping actually ends up turning Doctor Rice’s plan on its head, and it becomes apparent just how very deep the narrative of this movie goes. Rice, we learn, created a program that stealthily introduced ingredients into everyday foodstuffs to attack and wipe out the X Gene. Then he created the kids as new mutant soldiers but they didn’t work properly. Now they’ve escaped, and will go on to create new generations of mutants themselves. The seeds of Rice’s own undoing were planted by the work he undertook.

The final piece of that puzzle is the death of the old guard to ensure the survival of the new. Logan doesn’t want to fight anymore. Partly because he’s in pain but mostly because he doesn’t want to be the person he was engineered to be. Every kill he makes takes him further down the road of being exactly what Stryker and the Weapon X program wanted him to be. His temper hasn’t diminished, it’s just that he no longer wants to be that guy. But when he sees this new, ‘pure’ generation of mutants threatened, he’s happy to unsheathe his claws one last time to make sure they’re safe. Make no mistake, the moment Logan injects himself with a full vial of the mutant ‘booster’ – which he’s been explicitly told will be bad for him – he does so knowing he’s going to die. He hurls himself into that fight to ensure the future of his daughter and her friends, and to fulfil the last dying wish of the last friend he ever had.

Is the film perfect? Well, no. But it’s telling that the only ‘flaws’ relate to things I could stand to see more of. Stephen Merchant’s turn as Caliban is a beautiful, nuanced portrayal which came out of nowhere for an actor famous for comedy roles. More of him would have been brilliant, as would more of Xavier. The fact that so much of what gets listed off in exposition as history sounds fantastically compelling lends further weight to my feeling that his movie feels like it should cap a much better series. I want to see the slow degeneration of the X-Men and mutant kind, the fights that occur, what happens to Magneto and the event that killed the last X-Men and left Charles in the mess he’s in. I want to see the real stories on which the comics people are clinging to are based. It’s a film that sells its own snapshot so well with so much layered depth and detail that I simply can’t help wanting more, and feeling disappointed knowing I’ll never get it.

Logan isn’t just a great genre movie. It’s a great movie, full stop. Not one single person brings anything less than their A game to the table, Mangold directs magnificently and the screenplay is a thing of perfection. It’s just such a shame it doesn’t get to be the capstone to a much better series involving the character.