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But in the franchise, this sudden graphic aspect that was nowhere to be seen seems a bit jarring, almost like a tonality gap with the previous movies.
And in a way, that's not very useful and the movie certainly could have been "mature" enough without this. Nolan's Batman seemee more adult to me, and all 3 were PG 13.

That's perhaps the biggest reason why the Nolan movies are the best for me. They struck a really tight balance between elements based in realism and flights of fancy, without ever going completely overboard.

Big Ben wrote:Wolverine is essentially the mutant equivalent of a Berserker in the comics and there has most certainly been graphic violence in Wolverine comics for over thirty years.

At first Wolverine was a berserker with no qualms about killing people, but this was toned down early on in his history after the Dark Phoenix Saga. Claremont and Byrne originally intended Jean Grey to survive that event, but after putting out an issue where Jean (in her Dark Phoenix guise) destroys an inhabited planet, Editor in Chief Jim Shooter made the famous declaration "Superheroes don't kill". Of course, this ignores the fact that Wolverine was happily slicing up Hellfire Club goons mere issues before, so soon after a story appeared where Storm, as leader at the time, told Wolverine to reign in his homicidal tendencies. This largely stuck for the next few decades, and some of the best Wolverine stories, including his first limited series, revolve him overcoming his nature and taming the beast within.

The restrictions on violence were not in Universe and were very much mandated by Fox Studios. Violence, war and decapitation (See the rather awful Origins film which has all three.) were all there beforehand they simply had to be obscured for ratings purposes. If anything Logan is simply more honest about that reality (As real as a comic book film can be.). Logan is still a genre film through and through and just because it happens to be significantly more self aware than its' predecessors doesn't strip away those underpinnings. Just because the film is significantly more violent doesn't really mark a tonal shift in my personal opinion but rather an acceptance of what it always should have been. If Fox Studios could have made beaucoup bucks on R rated fair way back when they most certainly would have. A reminder that a far more violent version of The Wolverine exists. The studio simply decided to market the PG-13 version. The site is NSFW due to shot comparisons.

If you want to be really depressed though try debating if Logan takes place in the same timeline as the other films or if it takes place in an entirely different Universe and is a stand alone film as Hugh Jackman has suggested. People are still arguing about this right now.

I dont know how the Wolverine TC compares to the EC cut, but the additions certainly didnt transfigure the movie at all. I was told the movie was at least quite OK and relatively fun, but oh god what a boring drag it was.

I'll readily confess to my belief that the only X-Men film worth any meter of critical discussion is Logan. I was ten when the original film came out and I was wowed with it only because I was ten. Going through all the films in preparation for Logan really cemented in my mind that these were baseline okay to awful films with cast members that absolutely correct for the part but were woefully underused (Patrick Stewart for instance.) with scripts that were occasionally defecated out.

They are really, really comic book movies in a way that's very satisfying and won't be replicated, probably. The Wolverine is the truth, for one, but I've also really enjoyed the entire semi-reboot trilogy; I just find Logan's relationship to the other films to actually be the most engaging part of it, how it's simultaneously trying to be this grand send-off to this theoretical icon but it seems to deeply shun every single last thing about the character before that point. The X-Men films, somewhat amusingly, were never really built as anything more than single films; to almost comic effect, the "tag" at the end of every film seemed to set up something that was not followed upon whatsoever, and important characters just disappeared without mention. To see Logan try to be an endpoint to that styling is kind of commendable, but it didn't work for me, other than the very ending, which only works due to the fact there were 6 previous Wolverine-centered films that everyone more-or-less admired Jackman in.

I vastly prefer First Class, and then X2.