Apologies if this review is a little hasty/messy. I just got out the movie and due to the pacing i'm going to skip quite a bit of the story in order to tell the main aspects. Please excuse typo's and minor errors as i'm trying to remember a 2 hour movie.
The Good / The Plot
The movie is set in 2029. Pretty much everything looks like its from present day except the bio-mechanical enhancements that the villains have. No mutant has been natural born since 2004 (25 years ago) and the only three natural mutants we are aware of that around are Logan, Caliban and Prof X.
Logan is trying to earn a decent living, being a limo driver. He is losing his eye sight, is healing slower and is constantly in pain. He is also dying due to what he thinks is Adamantium poisoning (guess X-23 will suffer the same fate one day) In one scene he has to pull his claw out of his hand in order to make it come out when it gets stuck, slicing his hand in the process. Suprisingly the film was rather tame in that regard, it was rated 15 and the action and certain moments of the action/violence occur off-screen or quickly without lingering on the details. The most gruesome scene i can remember was Caliban being burned by the light in a torture scene to extract the whereabouts of Logan. Logan is trying to earn money in order to buy a boat so that he and Prof X can be away from people, Caliban confronts Logan at one stage, admitting that he knows Logan wont be interested in taking him along also.
Prof X meanwhile has a brain disease, the symptoms partially mirror alzheimer's however also include fits. Logan is attempting to dull these by stealing medicine or getting it through illegal deals. Due to Prof X's mental capacity and ability to hurt others with his mind during these fits, Logan is forced to look after him while Prof X spends most the movie talking down about Logan - until he remembers the past. Which is honestly sadly one of the only few hints towards what happened.
The general theory i had based on the movie is that several years ago (A radio announcer mentioned specifically when) Prof X had his first seizure and killed the X-Men other than Wolverine who survived. Its never officially stated in the movie, however the first meeting he has with Logan in the film he accuses him of doing something to the X-Men and just before his inneviteable death he acknowledges that he himself was responsible for causing a massive amount of people to be injured/die - and Logan has been trying to shield him from doing so again.
The main strong point of the film is Logan eventually growing to start to care about X-23, who is referred to as 'Laura' his daughter. The relationship suffers primarily from Laura not speaking much, and the words she does say are primarily a foreign language. Eventually she does talk but by then its a bit too late for us to really try to get attached to her character so instead they play the sympathy card by having her look after a tired wounded Logan, and him letting her sleep later in the film. They do have a strong father/daughter dynamic regardless of the lack of vocals and i'm sure they were going for the 'traumatised girl gains confidence thanks to her father in order to speak' angle, however she ended up being a bit bland because she is simply wide eyed or interested in most things around her. I think the only character aspects she has is that she is interested in horses and likes pink sunglasses and pringles, red.
Ofcourse the main thing people are wondering about is do they actually kill off Logan? and unfortunately they do, in not the most ceremonious way. He ends up using a vial to effectively supercharge his healing ability and wipe out a bunch of random guards to allow the child mutants time to escape, ofcourse this messes up and the child mutants get captured only for Logan to appear and finally end things, killing Zander Rice (I believe this was the first time they met in person) and fighting X-24. He's eventually thrown backwards and impaled on a tree in what appears to be his side. He dies from his injury's while acknowledging X-23 as his daughter, and she has a funeral for him using lines from a cowboy movie she watched with Prof X.
There are a few remarks that Logan makes against the X-Men comics that feel a little weird, as he insults them for not killing characters or for not being accurate. I suppose they are trying to imply that the X-Men Universe has its own series of comics based on the X-Men where its watered down and kid friendly - though i'm fairly sure i read somewhere the comics were created for the movie and are not actual comics. I believe the movie comic was something along the lines of 'Eden Of The East' which led to the main plot being to travel to the location specified in the comic.
There are ways to branch off into a series focusing around a new team of mutants, possibly led by the female voice we hear who allows them to pass border control, or simply X-23 and a group of child mutants working together. However in regards to Logan, it feels final.
The Bad / The Villains & Pacing
We are introduced to our tertiary villain, Donald Pierce, shortly into the film. He's been following Logan's activity but solely because he is searching for X-23. He mentions being a fan of Logan, but he's not really interesting or threatening. If anything he's kind of just there. I dont remember him fighting, though that may be because he's not really important to the story other than leading the group of grunts. He may have fought, but there are so many fights you forget them completely unless they provide something new. If you had the unfortunate time of sitting through Age Of Extinction he reminds me a lot of Titus Welliver's James Savoy, just less intimidating and not as memorable. I saw Logan less than an hour or so ago and i've forgotten almost every scene of him except for him putting his metal hand back on in a hospital bed after a fight scene where Caliban blew himself up. He died being killed by several child mutants that Zander Rice bred from the DNA of previous mutants.
Logan eventually agrees to help, however is too late to save X-23's career - who was a nurse that worked with the secondary villain of the film - Zander Rice. He comes across as a bit disturbing, in that he has some creepy sort of caring towards his creations. He is also not intimidating in the slightest. They try desperately to make him intimidating, and he honestly should be as he's a great actor, but he just comes across as trying to justify himself to Wolverine when the two finally meet - only to be shot in the head and unceremoniously never seen or referred to again. From the second he is introduced you know he's either going to be killed by his creations, Wolverine or X-23 and he isnt even given a good death.
The main villain of the film is X-24, an 'original' creation for this film. If you have seen X-Men Origins Wolverine... well its basically the same concept as Deadpool in that film. A mutant that apparently can possess the abilities of other mutants. However in this case he is just a younger Wolverine clone with a different hair cut to Wolverine so we can tell them apart. He is singlehandidly the biggest disappoint to come from Logan. Despite being built-up thanks to a video recording in the first act of the movie, he appears kills a family and Prof X and then is easily defeated by a car driven by a side character before being shot in the eye by that character. The second time, he is killed with the obvious Adamantium bullet that is mentioned throughout the movie.
The pacing of the film unfortunately feels a bit stretched. Several scenes that really needed to only occur once to establish the concept are done twice. Prof X loses control of his powers twice, A woman approaches Logan for help twice, Logan and X-24 fight twice, Donald Pierce talks to Logan while he's in a car twice, we see video of the experiments twice (same video different parts). I'm sure there are other examples. Its nice to be reminded of certain aspects and admittedly a few i listed do show an increased need for urgency, but it just doesnt help with the pacing.
It also does not help that the movie has no sense of time, while i appreciate the lack of subtitles giving the movie a more realistic feel, we are given a timelimit of 'get a person to here by friday so they can cross the border' - and then the movie never tells us which day it is, how longs it been, where exactly they are in relation to the border or anything else that would give us a sense that the story was progressing until they eventually arrive at the place.
When they are driving and a vehicle swerves randomly causing a family transporting a few horses to pull over, only for the horses to then escape and for Prof X to encourage Logan to pull over to help and they get asked to come to their house- you can probably tell that something bad is going to happen to this family later in the movie. The movie does its best to develop these characters as down on their luck and to an extent it works in getting us to feel a little towards these characters and forget that they are being chased - enough for us to let our guard down before X-24's first appearance.
Overall;
The only real problems with the movie are the pacing and the villains. Otherwise the film is strong, we have nice development for the characters even though Prof X is a bit more of a jerk towards Logan than normal for most the movie. Certain aspects of the plot are a bit predictable, when you are told they are heading on a journey to a certain location you know it's either not going to be as expected or that the villains will surely find them and sure enough they discover a random photograph with the details either left by X-23 or another of the missing mutants.
Its easily Hugh Jackman at his best. Prof X i cannot say the same for given he felt out of character, especially considering this film is meant to follow on many years after the end of Days Of Future Past, but he was given enough screentime even though his death was used for shock/horror value. Caliban is shown as a good hearted person and i'm actually quite glad that he was not simply turned into a tool to use against Wolverine, even when captured or tortured he delays them long enough to help Wolverine escape and eventually sacrifices himself. Its nice having a captured character with the ability to track someone who does not instantly betray their friends when they are tortured.
I do not think the movie is genre defining or anything insanely amazing, however i will note that it is a great film despite the bad aspects i have mentioned about it's villains and pacing. I would recommend seeing this movie if you are a fan of Hugh Jackman or have been interested in the series, i think it is the best in the Wolverine trilogy although once again the villains are disappointing.