If you had walked up to me in 2015 and told me there would be an objectively good X-Men movie playing in theaters by 2017, I would have laughed in your face. Then my laughter would have slowly shifted into gross sobbing, and you would have had to stand there awkwardly while I cried about the existence of The Last Stand.

The reason for 2015-me’s distress isn’t just black holes in the plots, or the rampant mischaracterization of the superheroes I’ve loved since I was seven. It’s the fact that the movies are almost void of the high points of the comics – the use of the mutant metaphor to allude to actual struggles faced by oppressed minority groups in real life, and the portrayal of the X-Men as a makeshift family of misfits.

I always assumed the reason for these faults was the the studio’s obsession with constantly shoving Wolverine to the center stage to maximize profits without any regard to the integrity of the movie. But guess what? Logan is so much about Wolverine that the movie is named after him, and yet it’s both well-written and absolutely nails the best of the X-Men comics without even having the X-Men in it.

Logan is a movie about how a family can be a grizzled war veteran-turned limo driver, an albino sewer mutant househusband, a disabled psychic who should have had a career as a horse-whisperer, and a ten year old weapon of mass destruction. It’s a movie about American corporations ruining the lives of people in Mexico, forcing children to flee danger by crossing the border between our country in hopes of finding a better life (and then immediately trucking it over to Canada, which made me laugh out loud in the theater). It’s a movie about how a superhero whose superpower is having knives for hands is probably going to end up violently stabbing people to death, and how ridiculous it would be to put this Knife Hands McGee in an all-ages comic book or PG-13 movie.

It’s almost as if when 20th Century Fox decided to make an R-rated X-Men movie after the success of the R-rated Deadpool, they subsequently decided not to just spit out a slurry of old comic plots into an action flick script made to be as unobjectionable to as many people as possible, and actually make an original movie. And by “almost if,” I mean I can’t think of another explanation for why these idiots couldn’t have been making movies this good the whole time. So thank you Deadpool, and thank you Logan’s R-rating – which it absolutely warrants, by the way. If gore turns your stomach, you should probably give this movie a wide berth. But if you don’t mind the hacking and slashing (and the general horror that comes from watching a ten year old commit murder), I can’t think of another reason to not recommend this movie to you.

Don’t like superhero movies? There’s absolutely zero superheroing in this movie. Knife Hands McGee is only tangentially a superhero even when he’s wearing spandex and saving the world, and here he doesn’t get up to either.

Need more than mindless gory action for a movie to be enjoyable? None of the violence in this movie is meant to just be mindless fun. The action is intense because of how much you care about the characters and their development, which is unquestionably the true focus of the movie.

Seen any X-Men movie, ever, and left the theater horribly disappointed and wary to repeat the experience? I understand. Believe me, I understand. But Hugh Jackman’s farewell to the character of Wolverine is the first movie to actually utilize Hugh Jackman’s acting abilities. Or Patrick Stewart’s, for that matter. And the story and direction by James Mangold is not only comprehensible (unusual for the franchise), but genuinely clever (even more unusual for the franchise).

But that’s more than enough talk of previous movies; the clouds have parted, the sun is shining, and I’m going to rewatch Logan until I forget that The Last Stand ever even existed, because it’s 2017 and there’s finally an objectively good X-Men movie playing in theaters.