grindhouse, pollack-level splatter

I didn’t want to see Lo­gan (2017).

I don’t even re­al­ly love com­ic book movies. I en­joy them well enough when I am watch­ing them but to me it’s more like en­joy­ing a fire­works dis­play. It’s fun and all but large­ly does­n’t do much to stay with me or res­onate past that first viewing. 

I had zero in­ter­est in see­ing Lo­gan and when I saw the first trail­ers I was like “what are there, 20 of these fuck­ing things now?” Then a week ago I read the Ain’t it Cool re­view and that kind of turned me around and I’m re­al­ly glad it did.

Every­thing I gen­er­al­ly don’t care about in com­ic flicks is ab­sent in Lo­gan and every­thing that is ab­sent in those flicks that I miss is present. In fact, this is re­al­ly in many, many, many ways a grind­house flick and I don’t just say that be­cause of its (won­der­ful­ly) high body count or Pol­lack-lev­el splat­ter. It has the same sense of melan­cholic lone­ly lurch em­bed­ded in it that de­fines some of the best grind­house films. It feels like Rolling Thun­der with a bud­get and a wider scope. In fact from the open­ing (prob­a­bly dig­i­tal) op­ti­cal white ti­tles I was piqued. But this isn’t just styl­is­ti­cal­ly grind­house, though the nat­u­ral­is­tic light­ing and tone def­i­nite­ly feel like a nod in that direction. 

It’s also very much at­tuned to that feel­ing of present am­bi­ent dread, a thread that runs through this flick both in the sub and supertext. 

Ver­dict is I am pret­ty well blown back. This was my fa­vorite su­per­hero movie since Un­break­able (2000) and feels a rel­e­vant piece to two oth­er movies from the last twelve months that also feel cut from the grind­house cloth: Last year’s Green Room and last week’s Get Out.

This is a hard, hard R‑rated adult su­per­hero movie about peo­ple, and if you re­moved all the su­per­heroic pow­ers from the sto­ry (a pis­tol in place of claws) you’d still have a great, great movie.
 
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2017 Ja­son Malmberg.

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