The Death of Robin Hood

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood is a film of two halves and, as it happens, two aspect ratios. The first, weaker section is a muddy, 'scope reorganisation of Sherwood Forest mythology with Hugh Jackman's gruff outlaw living in a fog-shrouded wilderness, pursued by the youthful descendants of his many victims. In this pointedly revisionist telling Robin Hood does not redistribute wealth from corrupt nobles and is instead a pitiless bandit who has killed more people than he cares to count. As well as clawing the life out of the middle-aged men attempting to settle some forgotten score, Robin is pressed (only very lightly) in this section to kill a woman and blast an arrow through the head of a child. This latter detail placing Jackman's Hood in the same cinematic company as Henry Fonda's Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West or Clint Eastwood's William Munny from Unforgiven. They are all men who have indulged too greatly in their evil and cannot, therefore, hope for redemption. 

The muck-caked misery of this opening act is somewhat marred then by an approach to violence that teeters on the absurd, with Jackman's ferocious highwayman able to force torches through the blubbering, blancmange-like bodies of his enemies. Presumably a front-end packed with such gruesome incident is a sop to back-end that is almost completely still and meditative. Sarnoski twists fragmented ballads of courteous outlaws - that date back to the earliest days of the printed press - to arrive at a piece that presents like a half-remembered slither of Arthurian legend. The height and width of the film changes to a more European standard while cinematographer Pat Scola fills his frame with landscapes that are crafted out of faces. So, although Jackman's snarling, horizontal Santa struggles to come to terms with his truly awful past, Jodie Comer's prioress and Faith Delaney's Little Margaret are seen to bask in the strange stability that this chained animal offers. Unable to lift a weapon or otherwise retreat from this Avalonian isle, Jackman's Hood detaches from his mainland persona and begins talking through thoughts and feelings that are unencumbered by levity or cod psychoanalytical insight. Instead, we have the final address of a monster teetering on the edge of an oblivion proposed, centuries earlier, by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius. 

Deadpool & Wolverine

Ryan Reynolds, who is already plastered all over Disney+ with his Welcome to Wrexham documentary series, finally makes his presence known in the big screen Marvel universe with Deadpool & Wolverine, a long-promised meet-up that keeps some plates spinning for a cinematic slate that is, we are repeatedly told here, no longer in the rudest of health. Rather than immediately have Reynolds' talkative (or annoying, if you prefer) avatar brushing shoulders with what remains of The Avengers, director Shaun Levy and his co-writers, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Reynolds again have concocted a slightly more metatextual premise for their crossover event. A concept that uses the Whovian claptrap present in cancelled streaming serial Loki to draw in characters from films that were either made when Marvel was happily licensing off any property it could to stay solvent or released under regimes now obliterated by enormous, monopoly-flouting mergers. 

So, as well as an eternally reliable Hugh Jackman essaying a particularly grumpy take on The Wolverine, Jennifer Garner's Elektra is wished back into being, along with Dafne Keen's X-23 (from Logan) and Channing Tatum as a version of Gambit that never quite made it out of development hell. All are welcome distractions from the relentless motor-mouthing - particularly Tatum who ably demonstrates the difference between genuine, comedic irreverence and a strain of humour, otherwise omnipresent in this film, in which the audience often feels like they've been taken hostage by a brand ambassador. It's the film's use of Wesley Snipes though as an older, grouchier Blade that turns out to be the biggest double-edged sword. Of course, in the week that Kris Kristofferson has passed away, it's wonderful to see Snipes back in his tacti-Goth get up, now with a fine line of grey creeping up the knife-edge of his hairline, but the brief machete-twirling seen here is not an adequate resolution for a performance and persona that has cast such a massive, sun darkening shadow across the genre of comic book adaptations. 

As Deadpool & Wolverine rattles ever closer to its conclusion, the false expectations engendered by its premise become more apparent, even glaring. The fourth-wall breaking muddies the conceptual water: are these heroes refugees from their own, individual franchises or orphaned ideas that have been tossed off from our higher, indifferent reality? Is the plane of existence that we, the viewer, inhabit something that can be accessed by the onscreen characters? If Deadpool can directly address the audience, shouldn't his allies harbour some resentment for, if not the cinemagoer that did not turn up for each of their individual instalments, then perhaps the executive regimes that so mishandled their incredible destinies? The crumbling edifice of the 20th Century Fox logo is frequent background flavour in a topographical realisation of a desktop recycle bin but is that really enough to sate our collective bloodlust? Basically, is The Daywalker cleaving David S. Goyer, the writer-director of New Line's Blade: Trinity, in twaine a realistic expectation for post-modern, early-2000s nostalgia bait or is it merely the delusional desire of this terminally chippy weirdo? 

Regardless, Ryan Reynolds' latest charm offensive absolutely peters out, content to build for itself yet another world-destroying machine then have it be destroyed. Like a great many Marvel films then, Deadpool & Wolverine peaks while the credits are rolling. Although, unusually, the entertainment being extracted here isn't premised on even more completely unrealistic (or, in their more recent instances, unlikely to be referred to again) expectations. Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day plays over interlaced B-roll footage from the Fox era and, for once, it feels like the shattering of motion picture kayfabe is being leveraged in a genuinely affectionate, rather than cynically advantageous, way. As a device, these behind-the-scenes glimpses are typically limited to comedies, deployed as a way to reassure anyone watching that of course the crew were absolutely delighted to be on set that day when the highest paid actor decided to waste everybody's time by ad-libbing. Here though, the effect is sincere and cumulative, tracking through a couple of decades worth of both success and failure; most of which hinge upon the unfailing likeability being broadcast by Jackman. A superhero actor who, at this point, is surely second only to Christopher Reeve in terms of being able to remain dignified, even immune, when surrounded by hare-brained nonsense.

Logan

Setting aside the frontier westerns that writer-director James Mangold explicitly invokes, it's easy to draw parallels between Logan and the Lone Wolf and Cub films. Apart from the most obvious point of comparison - an ageing eviscerator travelling with an equally dangerous child - both frame their tales against countries eating themselves alive. Like Tokugawa era Japan, the Americas seen in Logan are focused around the spaces where civilisation has broken and retreated. An age has passed and we are trapped in a bleak, transitory phase. Hugh Jackman's indefatigable Wolverine spends every waking moment driving a limo, to break even, while wealthy landowners posse up, acting like feudal barons eager to exercise their power of life and death. There's no sense of a rigid, overarching force of law, just scattered and sometimes mechanised clans acting with impunity. The United States is depicted as corrupt and diseased, a condition reflected in both the film's heroes and villains. Regardless of allegiance these beings are all either augmented or outright sedated.

People are reduced to the level of meat, their flesh farmed and catalogued for a purely utilitarian idea of imitation. Bodies are simply currency to be broken down and used up by the state. The villains of the piece, The Reavers, are a group of mutant hating assassins usually drawn tangling with The X-Men or The Punisher, their looks hovering somewhere on the splatterpunk spectrum. Here they are depicted as private military surplus, veterans chewed up by some distant war now earning consultancy money committing war crimes in their home country. Their bulky cybernetic limbs designed to stress not maniacal customisation but instead the pressing need to replace that which an IED has obliterated. Logan then is the first Wolverine film actually arranged around the bodily trauma inherent to the character's super identity. He's built to be hurt, an atypically invincible target for assorted adversaries to impotently expel against. In Logan, the title character is no longer particularly exceptional though. Aside from the photostat characters that share his powers, even standard enemies have access to technology that allows them to circumvent apparently permanent damage. The extraordinary has been rendered routine. In response, Wolverine moulders.

Previous Wolverine films have dealt with the character as a constant battling against the bitterness and jealousy that has sprung up in response to his existence. Likewise, the majority of X-Men films depict Wolverine as a hesitant, airtight personality. X-Men: First Class even went so far as to have our hairy hero pointedly sitting out the entire adventure just to get drunk in a bar. This unkillable man has been built to wander, never quite putting down roots. Logan flips those ideas, forcing stakes and a sense of permanence on the perennial drifter and his uncompromised sense of identity. Wolverine's DNA has been decoded and replicated, resulting in two distinct approaches to the idea of a clone. This offspring, and the conflict they bring, are presented as personifications of the tension that exists between hereditary and environmental influences on the individual. Dafne Keen's Laura / X-23 is Wolverine as a child, a blank slate that offers the opportunity to chart a more emotionally stable personality. Laura is her parent stripped of the crushing weight of experience. She's young enough to still be killing as a reflex but also idealistic enough to still desire the company of a pack.

Lone Wolf and Cub resurfaces again in how Wolverine relates to his child. Like Daigoro, Laura is often treated as extension of the parent, an extraneous limb that is trusted to look after itself. When Ogami Itto abandons his son to the winds it's alien but instructive, the fatalism that pulses through Bushido presented as a terrifying power play. When Wolverine leaves Laura to fend for herself it's because he doesn't want the hassle - his deep self-loathing has finally acquired an external target. Laura is fresh and new, she represents change. If Wolverine is to accept her as his daughter then he will also have to adjust his behaviour, a difficult proposition for a being whose life is built on violent repetition. Patrick Stewart's decrepit Xavier is happy to break his holding pattern though, eager to take on a new charge and help her grow as a person. The centuries old beast man would prefer a slow, tranquillised slide into obsolescence. As First Class demonstrated, it's just easier for him.

Wolverine's other child is an abomination. X-24 is Hugh Jackman's Men's Health body frozen in the moment it reached peak shred. 24 represents the soulless replication of a production line, Weapon X as the obedient, heavily medicated drone he was originally built to be. This is a Wolverine only able to express the most base aspect of his personality - rage. Set against the depressed, dying source, 24 register as a manifestation of the passions that have died, or at the very least curdled, inside The Wolverine. Logan's insistence that 24 should remain this one-note shade is the film's most obvious failing. Despite Logan's midcard fight being built around a situation and setting that explicitly recalls Universal Soldier and its John Hyams directed sequels, Mangold is content to treat the character as an extrinsic obstacle rather than a fresh facsimile looking to violently explore, then depose his failing originator. 24 has no motor, he's an automaton stuck functioning as a mythic aggressor rather than a separate, interesting character in his own right. None of that disappointment lingers too long though, because in the homestretch we're given the sights and sounds of a wounded, bloodthirsty beast and his rampaging cub singing to each other across unfamiliar territory. Their howling an expression of the pure joy they are both about to find in slaughter.