A fitting conclusion to the Wolverine story, or at least Hugh Jackman’s part in it. Having played the bad-tempered, steel-clawed, hirsute​ immortal for 17 years, Jackman described this final chapter as the closest he ever got to being truthful to Wolverine’s real character. It is certainly the best of the isolated Wolverine films, and the most tonally separate, with moments of reflection, poignancy and genuine drama, most keenly observed in the familial relationship between Logan and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart, faultless). The film is set in Texas, 2029, in a dusty, isolated outback town where the washed-up, alcohol-dependent Logan works as a chauffeur in a bid to pay for the medicine needed to control Xavier’s worsening dementia. The two are riddled with guilt: Logan for the lives and relationships lost over centuries of violence and heartbreak, and Xavier for the wider breakdown of relations between humans and mutants, and what looks like the aftermath of a mutant genocide. The pair have become both friend and foe, carer and patient, father and son. Then suddenly, a new hope: 11 year old mutant Laura (Dafne Keen) springs into their lives, escaping capture from mad eugenics doctor Richard E. Grant and his band of ruthless enforcers. She and many other children her age are the by-product of a secret governmental testing facility used to create supercharged mutants, only now their tweenie tribe has escaped and the docs need to cover their tracks. The girl provides Wolverine with his final shot at redemption, and the film assumes the guise of a dysfunctional road movie with Logan and Xavier transporting the girl to the relative safety of the North Dakota border and a new home for mutant-kind. The violence is more visceral and intense than ever before, with every laboured blow and bullet-wound a constant source of recoil and strife for the slowly degenerating Wolverine, and the film’s continuous F-bombs support director James Mangold’s vision for a more adult-themed franchise movie. But for all its adherence to Marvel’s comic book cliches, it is the relatable, human interactions which work best and are at the heart of the film. Like Deadpool before it, this offers more than your standard superhero film, and it is all the better for it.