Los Angeles, United States—After eight movies over 17 years, Hugh Jackman has returned for his final hurrah as Wolverine in “Logan,” an edgier, darker take on everyone’s favorite hairy, metal-clawed mutant anti-hero.
Jackman, 48, had agreed with director James Mangold that if he was going to reprise his iconic role as the cigar-chomping loner one last time, it should be the first R-rated outing in the “X-Men” franchise aimed at a more adult audience.
“Hugh and I didn’t want to do it if we couldn’t do something very different,” Mangold said at a preview in Los Angeles of Twentieth Century Fox’s 2017 slate.
“We both felt like we had made the last movie and we also felt like… there’s a slew of comic book-themed films, superhero movies—whatever you want to call them—and I, for one, am feeling kind of an exhaustion watching them, generally.”
“Logan,” which takes place more than 50 years after the events of “X-Men: Days of Future Past” (2014), sees Wolverine/Logan aging, weary and vulnerable.
Sporting an unkempt gray beard, he drinks his days away on the Mexican border, picking up black market drugs to treat the dying Professor X, played for a seventh—and also final—time by acclaimed British thespian Patrick Stewart.
Logan is snapped abruptly out of his torpor when a mysterious woman begs him to protect a young girl – a stunning debut by English-Spanish newcomer Dafne Keen, 11 – who has powers remarkably like his own and is being pursued by dark forces.
More of a blood-spattered road movie than a traditional superhero film, the latest installment earned its R rating mainly because of the unrelenting, visceral violence which plays out from the opening scene.
It is expected to take $65 million over the weekend to top the domestic box office and $170 million worldwide.
Jackman, a versatile Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning performer as comfortable in stage musicals as blockbusters, has long been open about the fact that “Logan” would be his last Wolverine movie.
“He’s a warrior. He’s billed as a weapon, a killing machine, really. But as we say in the movie—it’s a quote from ‘Shane’—there’s no living with a killing. There’s a cost to violence,” Jackman told journalists at a screening in New York.
