Characters / X-Men Film Series: Transigen

Main Character Index
Main Characters: X-Men | Professor X | Magneto | Wolverine | Mystique | Jean Grey | Deadpool
Original Timeline: X-Men | Free Mutants | Other Mutants | Brotherhood | Weapon X | Humans | Hellfire Club
New Timeline: X-Men | New Mutants | X-Force | Apocalypse and His Followers | Transigen | Other Mutants | Humans | Weapon X | D'Bari | New Mutants Villains
Other Timelines: Earth-17040 | Earth-17372

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Transigen

Film Appearances: Logan

Transigen is a successor to the Weapon X project, headed by Dr. Zander Rice.

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In General

• Corporate Conspiracy: Although they put up a benign public front, they are actually the successor to the Weapon X project, and are directly involved in illegal human experimentation on mutant children. They're also responsible for preventing further mutant births via genetically modified crops which suppress the X-gene. Their master plan, formulated by Dr. Zander Rice, is to control mutantkind by wiping out the old mutants and replacing them with selectively bred mutants of their own.
• Evil, Inc.: Hiding behind a benevolent public image, they are directly involved in illegal human experimentation on mutant children. They're also responsible for preventing further mutant births via genetically modified crops, which suppress the X-gene.
• Expy: For the Facility from the comics, both as the creators of X-23 as well as a general successor to the Weapon X project.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Transigen succeeded where William Stryker's plan and Bolivar Trask's sentinels failed: wiping out mutant-kind without risking global human genocide or turning the world into a Terminator-esque wasteland. Their secret? Rather than attacking mutants directly, they quietly prevented new manifestations by using genetically-modified foods that suppressed the X-Gene. It was only once the mutant population was already dying out that the Reavers became involved. Once the old mutants were virtually extinct, they then began experiments on selectively breeding mutants of their own with harvested genetic material.
• Human Weapon: Their ultimate purpose is to harness mutant powers by creating Designer Babies with desirable traits they can turn into weapons.
• Medical Rape and Impregnate: This is pretty much how they created Laura, Rictor, and all of the other mutant children in that hospital seen in Gabriela's video. They kidnapped several Mexican girls, impregnated them with embryos against their will, and then killed them after they gave birth.
• Pragmatic Villainy: How Transigen succeeded where previous attempts to wipe out mutants failed: rather than simply try to kill them all, they used gene therapy hidden in common foodstuffs to quietly put an end to random mutations, waited for nature to take care of the majority of mutants, then sicced the Reavers on the few that were left.
• Would Hurt a Child: Gabriela's video shows the children's upbringing was very abusive, and that the company was planning to put them all down when they failed to make good soldiers.

Transigen Staff

Zander Rice

Dr. Zander Rice

"You will not survive further wounds."

Played By: Richard E. Grant

Voiced By: Gerardo Reyero (Latin-American Spanish)

Film Appearances: Logan

"My goal was not to end mutant kind, but to control it. I realized, we needn't stop perfecting what we eat and drink, but we could use that as part of us to perfect ourselves. To distribute gene therapy discreetly through everything, from sweet drinks to breakfast cereals. And it worked. Random mutancy went the way of polio."

The scientist heading up the project which created the X-23 program.

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• Adaptational Nice Guy: Zigzagged. Considering how horrible his comic counterpart was, anything would be a step up. He is certainly much nicer than his comic counterpart, with the Faux Affably Evil tone he takes when dealing with others rather than the rash and impulsive tone he always uses in X-23: Innocence Lost. However, while Rice's demeanor is more pleasant here, his comic counterpart's sole motivation for what he did to Laura was to avenge his father. This version seems to care about his father as much as Logan did, dismissing the mention of his death as if it were nothing — he has only his own bottomless evil to justify his actions.
• Age Lift: No older than his mid-30s in X-23: Innocence Lost, in Logan he's pushing 60.
• Asshole Victim: He gets killed courtesy of Logan, though he was such a despicable monster that he easily had it coming. Not even Pierce seems too bothered by it.
• Big Bad: He is the scientist responsible for the mass suppression of the mutant gene. Although Pierce is the most active threat in Logan, Rice calls the shots when trying to capture Laura.
• Composite Character: Rice blends traits of the version of himself from X-23: Innocence Lost with both Sarah Kinney and Martin Sutter. He takes over Sarah's role of being Laura's creator, while taking on Sutter's role as the overall head of the X-23 project. His attitude also borrows a bit of Cornelius from Death of Wolverine in his justifications for his actions.
• Control Freak: Rice's actions aren't driven by a hatred of mutants, but rather his desire to keep all mutants under his own control, using surreptitious gene therapy to get rid of random mutations so that he can have total control over the mutant children he breeds in his lab. Throughout his scenes, he's mostly a Soft-Spoken Sadist when he's in control of a situation, but starts shouting when X-24 doesn't immediately respond to his commands.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first glimpse we get of him is from Gabriela's video recording, where he berates one of the nurses for giving a birthday party to the Transigen children because he doesn't view them as people, and would rather have them treated as objects and experiments. That should tell you everything you need to know about him.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Averted; while he mentions his father to Logan, Rice is totally unconcerned by the fact that Logan killed him, brushing it off as if it were totally irrelevant to their conversation. While he does treat X-24 with some small affection, Rice still sees him as a living weapon first and foremost, having bred X-24 to be a rage-fueled killing machine and nothing else.
• Evil Brit: Due to being played by Richard E. Grant, who keeps his natural accent.
• Evil Counterpart: He runs a mutant-centric facility like Charles Xavier, though in contrast to Charles' Gifted School for Mutant Youngsters, which helped educate mutants and train them to fight for good as X-Men, Rice treats the X-23s as nothing more than intellectual property with copyrights and patents, and viciously abuses and trains them to become ravenous killers against their will. Furthermore, Charles has a Cool Old Guy demeanor with a brilliant intellect, optimistic mindset, and deep affection for fellow mutants, while Rice befits the Evil Old Folks type, solely following an Ambition Is Evil goal and showing zero compassion to...well, anything.
• Fantastic Racism: Rice doesn't exactly hate mutants, but he also doesn't consider them people in their own right (and in fairness, he's hardly any nicer to his fellow humans), seeing them only as a resource that he alone should control. While Pierce brags that Rice wiped out mutantkind, Rice brushes it off as exaggeration, admitting that he wasn't aiming for genocide, but rather to eliminate random mutation so that he could have total control over any living mutants.
• Faux Affably Evil: He often affects a polite front when dealing with others, and while he's not the outright sadistic bastard he was in the books (torturing Laura just because Logan killed his father), underneath that exterior he's still a sociopath who views the X-23 children as tools he can dispose of on a whim.
  Zander: I believe you knew my father.
  Logan: Yeah. He was one of the assholes who put this poison in me.
  Zander: Yes, he was one of them.
  Logan: I'm pretty sure I killed him.
  Zander: Yes, I believe you did.
• Freudian Excuse: Averted. Like in the comics, his father was a scientist for Weapon X who put the adamantium in Logan and was subsequently killed by him. Unlike his comic counterpart, he really doesn't give a shit.
• Hate Sink: He is a heartless Mad Scientist who is responsible for killing off almost the entirety of mutantkind for greed, treating the mutant children like objects, ordering the X-24 mutant to massacre an entire innocent family while he gleefully witnesses it, and having absolutely no sense of compassion whatsoever. While his second-in-command Pierce is equally monstrous, he's at least entertaining and has an element of coolness to him. Rice has nothing like that. It is nothing but positively delightful to see Logan unceremoniously kill him during his Motive Rant.
• Hypocrite:
  • He tries to convince Caliban to help him hunt Laura down by pointing out how deadly and easy to anger she is, and that she's a danger to society if left unchecked. Which is all very sound, except: a) she's only that way because of how he and Transigen treated her; b) there are infinitely better ways to solve the problem than infanticide; c) the first reason they were trying to kill her was because she wasn't merciless enough; and d) as seen by the rest of this page, no matter how bad he claims Laura is, he and his people are infinitely worse.
  • He's shown in Gabriela's video chastising one of the nurses for treating the X-23 children like the children they actually are, dismissively referring to them as things with patents and copyrights. And then he turns around and treats X-24 with quite fatherly affection while the latter is healing after his first encounter with Logan.
• It Is Dehumanising: How he orders the Transigen staff to view the children and how he sees them himself — as things, not as children.
• Jerkass: Even aside from his monstrous acts, he's a nasty, impatient, and condescending piece of work.
• Karmic Death: Rice gets killed by Logan, who he bragged to about how he killed off the latter's kind.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Logan unceremoniously shoots him in the neck, mid-Motive Rant no less.
• Lack of Empathy: To a sociopathic degree. He orders the nurses safeguarding the Transigen children to "think of them as things, not children", and casually orders Caliban's DNA to be harvested as he walks past his charred corpse without even looking down. His proactive genocide of mutantkind through genetically-modified foodstuffs is treated by him as simply "correcting a mistake", while his attempts to recapture the children result in the massacre of numerous innocent people that he doesn't bat an eye about.
• Mad Scientist: He was described as such in interviews and casting information.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Unlike Apocalypse, Magneto, or Stryker (who at least had a military background), Rice is a diabolical but otherwise normal scientist, though one that successfully engineered mutantkind's extinction. He leaves all the fighting to his armed mercenaries. Unlike Pierce, he doesn't even encounter Logan until the climactic showdown, and is Killed Mid-Sentence, instead of with a drawn-out fight.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: He tries to paint himself as having noble goals —- and may even prefer to believe it —- but he's really nothing short of a genocidal maniac motivated by vengeance, racism, and fear.
• Shadow Archetype: Rice is basically Xavier if he saw mutants as a resource to be exploited, not as actual people.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: He tries to deliver one to Logan as he enters his Motive Rant. Logan counters with his own Shut Up, Hannibal!. With a bullet to the throat.
• The Sociopath: While he is undeniably highly intelligent and dangerously charismatic, neither of these lessen the fact that he is nothing but a cold, sadistic, and downright despicable excuse for a human being.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: He admires X-24's brutality as he massacres Charles and the Munson family.
  Dr. Rice: He's fantastic.
• Undignified Death: Logan pulls out a gun and shoots him in the neck near the end of the film, and it's done so abruptly and casually as to be embarrassing. He barely has time to react, he doesn't get to finish his Motive Rant, and Logan doesn't even bother getting his claws dirty killing him.
• Would Hurt a Child: While not to the same extremes as his counterpart from the comics, Rice has no qualms carrying out painful experimentation on children, subjecting them to physical and emotional abuse, and then having them killed when he decides the X-23 project is a dead end.
• You Killed My Father: Unlike in the comics, where he tortures Laura out of Revenge by Proxy, the movie version acknowledges the trope in his confrontation with Logan, but doesn't seem to care much. Even his genocide of mutantkind is Nothing Personal, as he intends to create more, but this time under his control.

Donald Pierce

Donald Pierce

"You're not the only one who's been enhanced."

Played By: Boyd Holbrook

Voiced By: Luis Fernando Orozco (Latin-American Spanish)

Film Appearances: Logan

"As I live and breathe! The Wolverine! And he's a junkie now."

Leader of the Reavers, a force of cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries in the employ of Transigen, Pierce is heading the pursuit of the runaway Laura.

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• Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: The fingers of his prosthetic hand are capable of bending all the way backwards.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: The movie version of Donald Pierce is a lot more handsome than his comic version, even being played by a former model.
• Adaptational Wimp: Unlike the Pierce of the comics continuity, who is a full-on Cyborg with advanced technology and weapons, here he sports just a single prosthetic right hand.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: The comic book Pierce is a bigoted, genocidal, anti-mutant egomaniacal Jerkass who is so deeply unpleasant he was usually The Friend Nobody Likes even when he was part of other villainous groups, and is basically the Hate Sink bad guy of the X-Men franchise. This Pierce is a ruthless child-hunting mercenary who kills scores of innocent people, but he is also at least Faux Affably Evil and shows at least a degree of respect towards Wolverine and the other mutants. In fact, Holbrook himself suggests Pierce may actually like mutants, or at least have a soft spot for them. Put simply, comic book Pierce is so utterly odious that anything short of a totally faithful adaptation is a saint by comparison.
• Asshole Victim: Just like Dr. Rice, he ends up getting his just desserts in the worst way possible.
• Ax-Crazy: He's a murderous psychopath acting as a glorified bounty hunter to Transigen.
• Bad Boss: He doesn't seem to care too much for his own men, as he reacts with complete and utter indifference when Laura walks outside holding the decapitated head of a Reaver.
• Badass Normal: He's a regular human, but finds ways to make the life of the nigh-immortal Wolverine and X-23 a living Hell.
• Beard of Evil: His moustache and chinstrap combo is the facial hair negative of Logan's mutton chops at the end of the movie.
• Cool Shades: He sports a slick pair of sunglasses with dark red lenses.
• Combat Pragmatist: Donald is very aware of the gap between him and Laura and Logan, so he levels the playing field with a copious amount of weaponry.
• Composite Character: Much like Kimura, he leads his group's hunt for Laura, and is a Sociopathic Faux Affably Evil Jerkass and Smug Snake who's received bodily enhancements to help him with his job managing the kids.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: He gets killed by several mutant children using their powers on him all at once, and it is not pretty. To further clarify, he's warped to the ground, crushed and Buried Alive by razor-sharp blades of grass and telekinetic force, while the other children freeze him and electrocute him — all at the same time.
• Cyborg: Downplayed. Pierce has been cybernetically enhanced, but only sports a robotic right hand, compared to his half-man half-machine coming book self.
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost every line out of his mouth is dripping with dry wit.
• The Dragon: He is Transigen's relentless, calculating and intense head of security, leader of the Reavers, and Rice's top enforcer.
• Dragon Their Feet: Rice dies near the end of the movie, and Pierce is still calling the shots. Notably, he's the one who convinces X-24 to finish murdering Wolverine after the latter kills Rice.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • He is a fan of Logan's, and his flashy chains, gold tooth, conspicuous tattoos, and fancy haircut are a strong contrast with the older Logan's simple black suit and, later, working-class garb and scarring. Both even have a past in the military, and are mechanically enhanced in some hand-related fashion.
  • He's also one to Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool. Both are mercenaries with military backgrounds who have been physically enhanced, aren't in the best of mental health, and hide those facts by being polite and humorous. However, Wade is genuinely polite and humorous, only goes after bad people, and has friends and loved ones that prevent him from being an irredeemable monster, while Donald's politeness and humor is a total farce, has no problem killing innocent people, and is a sociopath with no redeeming qualities.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: All of the mutant children of X-23 pile on to make him beg for mercy. By the end of the movie, he's earned it.
• Fantastic Racism: While he claims to be a fan of Wolverine, Pierce treats any other mutant with casual disdain, calling Caliban "mutie" and "a natural fuck-up". His treatment of the X-23 kids is even worse, as in addition to them being mutants, they were also born in a lab; one clip of Gabriela's Video Will shows him breaking up a birthday party on the grounds that the children had "no birth".
• Faux Affably Evil: He is relatively casual with Logan and Laura, speaking to the latter as an old friend and sheepishly geeking out at Logan (he's a fan, by the way). But he is trying to kill Laura, and shows no signs of remorse over it. His friendly nature is also notably absent when he's torturing Caliban after Logan, Charles, and Laura escape from him the first time. The same goes for Dr. Rice, who is genteel and polite to everyone while also being utterly ruthless.
• First-Name Basis: He's one of the very few characters in the whole series to call Logan "James" in a failed attempt to win him over in a tense moment.
• The Heavy: Dr. Rice may be the Big Bad, but Pierce is the main threat driving the plot.
• Hypocrite: Despite claiming that he and the Reavers do what they do for "the good guys", them being the humans, he doesn't seem to have any qualms murdering Gabriela and a gas station worker in cold blood despite the fact that they were both humans themselves.
• Jerkass: Beneath that Southern Gentleman facade, he's a complete asshole.
• Karmic Death: He gets tortured to death by the children he considered "useless".
• Lack of Empathy: It's doubtful Pierce is even capable of empathy, but Gabriela's Video Wills shows him personally breaking up a kid's birthday party, with the words...
  Pierce: Birthday? No birth.
• Large Ham: Holbrook began picking scenery out of his teeth in the trailers.
• Laughably Evil: While Pierce is no doubt a depraved bastard to the highest order, one can't deny that his witty dialogue produces some pretty humorous moments throughout the film.
• Made of Iron: He can take a surprising amount of punishment for a normal human. He survives getting a pipe to the head, getting kicked in the head by Wolverine, and part of the blast of a grenade. He only goes down after most of the X-23s attack him simultaneously.
• Movie Superheroes Wear Black: Played with. He initially averts this by wearing a typical Badass Longcoat that does not resemble his comics outfit, but in the climax he does actually end up wearing a suit that seems like a black version of it, with the coat and buckles. It isn't entirely black either; it also happens to have some orange underneath the coat.
• Nerd in Evil's Helmet: While this never makes him any less menacing, he admits to being a big fan of Wolverine and Caliban, having read the comics.
  Pierce: (sheepishly) I'm a fan, by the way.
• Obviously Evil: Mechanical hand, skull tattoo in his neck, dressed in black, red shades, gold tooth, Beard of Evil. You can tell Pierce is a nasty piece of work from a mile away.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Of the Fantastic Racism variety — while he has some respect for Logan, make no mistake, the man's a odious racist towards mutants. Markedly, he's the first character in the movie franchise to use the term "muties", which in the comics is basically the n-word for mutants.
  • On a more real-world level, he also appears to have a dislike for, or at least look down upon, Mexican people. When blackmailing Logan about the gang he killed earlier, he casually states that finding dead cholos is not unusual, and his only description of Gabriela to Logan is "Mexican lady".
• Pragmatic Villainy: He often pulls his punches because his job is to capture the kids alive. It's why he tries to deescalate the fight with Laura at the beginning, and why at the end he only wounds Rictor and tries to use him as a bargaining chip.
• Psycho for Hire: Overall, Pierce is shown to get deep enjoyment out of his crimes, so it's pretty clear that he isn't Just Following Orders and is in it For the Evulz.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Donald is a huge fan of Wolverine, having read the X-Men comics, and he glorifies his robotic hand as if he got a new toy for his birthday. He's also a cruel mercenary who has no problem using torture and murder to get what he wants, even joking about it at times.
• Red Right Hand: His robotic right hand. In his debut, he looks like a normal guy until the hand comes into frame, adding another layer of menace. When fixing it, he does some Abnormal Limb Rotation Range with his fingers to further emphasize the artificiality of the limb.
• Sadist: He maniacally laughs while dragging one of the children's bodies into what looks like a crematorium, murders Gabriela in cold blood and then jokes about it, and tortures Caliban by exposing him to sunlight.
• Shout-Out: The film itself draws parallels between him and Jack Wilson from Shane. Observe that they both have a Red Right Hand in the form of a "evil hand" (in Wilson's case it's just a leather glove, while Pierce has the mechanical arm).
• The Sociopath: He fits the disorder to a T. Zero empathy? Superficial charm? Sadistic tendencies? A grandiose sense of self-worth? Yep, all checks!
• Sociopathic Soldier: Caliban pegs him as former military, and he has no qualms about any cruelty.
• Smug Snake: He likes to taunt Logan, Laura, and pretty much anyone else who isn't paying him, and he thinks very highly of himself due to being "enhanced". However, cybernetic arm aside, he's still just a normal human being. It bites him in the ass hard when the Transigen kids finally have enough of him.
• Villainous Valour: Smug Snake though he might be, Pierce doesn't back down when confronted by a mutant who could tear him limb from limb without a second thought. In the final battle, he does everything he physically can to aid X-24 in his fight against Logan, which is admittedly very little beyond taunts and shooting Logan In the Back with a harpoon gun, but to his credit he doesn't cut and run.
• Villains Want Mercy: He pleads and begs when the Transigen kids are killing him with their combined powers. It doesn't help him one bit.
• Would Hit a Girl: He shot Gabriela to death offscreen in her hotel room.
• Would Hurt a Child: He has no qualms against killing Laura or any of the other X-23 kids after using them as lab rats.

Gabriela Lopez

Gabriela Lopez

"I know you're still good inside. I know you want to help us."

Played By: Elizabeth Rodriguez

Voiced By: Kerygma Flores (Latin-American Spanish)

Film Appearances: Logan

"They thought we were too poor and stupid to understand. We're poor, yes, but we are not stupid. This is business. They are making soldiers. Killers."

A nurse working for Transigen to take care of their weaponized mutant children. She eventually has a change of heart and helps break many of the test subjects out, in particular becoming Laura's caretaker. She seeks out Logan hoping to hire him to take her and Laura to safety in Canada.

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• Disposable Woman: She more or less exists only to get Logan involved with the plot, and is killed off in the first act to make sure Laura has no where else to go. Aside from Pierce jokingly asking if Logan killed her, and a Mr. Exposition moment via a recording on her phone later, she pretty much goes unmentioned the rest of the film. We never even see Laura react to her death.
• Expy: Although parts of her character were passed on to Rice instead, Gabrielle nonetheless fulfills much of the same role in the story as Sarah Kinney.
• Heel–Face Turn: She began as a nurse on Transigen's project, but couldn't take watching the abuse Laura and the other children endured. She therefore joined several other nurses to help the children escape.
• Heroic Sacrifice: She risked her life, along with some of the other nurses, to help the children escape. She ultimately pays the price when Pierce catches up to her after she contacts Logan.
• Killed Offscreen: By Pierce. Logan finds her corpse full of bullet holes in the motel.
• Mr. Exposition: Her video gives Logan (and the audience) a quick run-down on who and what Laura is, and what Transigen's involvement in the whole mess is.
• Motherly Scientist: Downplayed. Dr. Rice never cared for the X-23 children, but Gabriela and the hospital staff did. There are a few scenes where the nurses try to give the kids a birthday party before Pierce breaks it up, and several nurses end up freeing the children and giving them the plan to run for the border.
• Parental Substitute: Gabriela is this for Laura, telling Logan with a wistful smile that Laura is her daughter, and confessing via her video will that even though she's actually not, she loves her anyway.
• Sacrificial Lamb: She dies pretty quickly in the hotel.
• The Stool Pigeon: Whistleblower Wilma variation. She secretly records Transigen's experiments on mutant children in hopes of exposing them.
• Video Wills: She leaves one for Logan on her phone in the even she doesn't make it, detailing the full extent of what Transigen has done to the children. Suffice it to say, she doesn't.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: She pretty much has one role in the film: get Laura into Logan's custody. Gabriela doesn't even make it through the end of the first act.

The Reavers

The Reavers

Film Appearances: Logan

Pierce's mercenaries, working for Transigen to hunt down remaining mutants and fugitive experiments like X-23.

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• Adaptational Wimp: Although they've all been enhanced with cybernetic prosthesis, thus far we've not seen characters with modifications to the extent of Deathstrike or Bonebreaker from the comics where they were a legitimate threat to the whole X-Men team yet here die easily to children and elderly ailing mutants.
• Arm Cannon: One of the Reavers carries an automatic weapon to replace his arm.
• Asshole Victim: They're a bunch of armed and despicable mercenaries who end up suffering from the wrath of Logan and the X-23 children.
• Beard of Evil: Many of the Reavers sport fairly thick beards.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • They all suffer a wide variety of horrific deaths during their chase of the Transigen children near the end of the film.
  • Special mention must be given to two Reavers who try and capture the Transigen child April (who can command plants), with April then forcing all of the surrounding pine trees to shed their bark and needles to be thrown at high velocity into the mercs. Suffice to say, they look more like pincushions than human beings afterwards.
• Cyborg: They all sport enhanced prosthetics. Whether they earned them over the course of their careers, lost their original limbs to the X-23 kids during their captivity, or were deliberately modified by Transigen to better handle them is currently unknown. Another possibility is that Transigen is recruiting ex-soldiers who've lost their limbs in combat.
• Mook Horror Show: The X-23 kids and Logan tear through them in various disturbing fashions, but it's quite satisfying, since they're all monstrous assholes.
• Mooks: They serve this purpose, providing an army of bad guys for Logan and Laura to slice to pieces.
• Too Dumb to Live: No, guys, following an incredibly dangerous mutant who functions much better in enclosed spaces into the building that she just retreated into is not a good idea. And while it was out of their hands due to needing to capture the children before they crossed the Canadian border, their decision to attack the Transigen children (who are super-powered Child Soldiers) in the middle of a forest when at least four of them can command plants was pretty moronic.
• Would Hurt a Child: They fire at Laura with live ammunition, and are not the least bit fazed by the thought of killing her or any of the other X-23 children.
• Zerg Rush: Barring their prosthetics, they're basically still just normal people; however, they seem to have near infinite numbers no matter how many the heroes kill, with the ranks boosted at certain points by both Mexican federales and American soldiers. When they are chasing after the X-23 kids, their powers may enable them to take down a few of the Reavers, but their sheer numbers force the mutants to just keep running.

Transigen Experiments

Laura

Laura / X23-23

"I've hurt people, too...They were bad people."

^{Click here to see her with her adamantium claws out}

Played by: Dafne Keen

Voiced by: Constanza García U. (Latin-American Spanish), Clara Quilichini (French)

Film Appearances: Logan

"A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can't break the mold. There's no living with a killing. There's no going back. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand that sticks. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her... everything's all right. There are no more guns in the valley."

— Laura, quoting Shane

A young mutant girl born in the alternate future where mutants have all but died off. Said by Charles Xavier to be "very much like" Logan, she's the first new mutant either have encountered in at least twenty years. Pursued by Pierce and his Reavers, Laura may help provide the key to the survival of the vanishing mutant race.

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• Action Girl: She's considerably younger than most examples, but it doesn't stop her from being utterly terrifying in combat.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: She's black-haired and green-eyed in the comics, while Keen's eyes and hair are both brown. Although in X-23's original appearance, she really did have brown hair.
• Adaptational Modesty: In the comics, Laura is usually (one of) the residential Ms. Fanservice(s) of whatever team she's on. She first appeared in NYX as a teen prostitute very much dressing the part, and her costumes frequently involve exposing her midsections. However, Keen was cast deliberately with an eye towards avoiding the expected "20-something actress in a hot outfit," leading to a much more modest appearance appropriate for an 11 year-old girl in the film. Though, like with her Adaptation Dye-Job, this does bring her closer to her original incarnation.
• Adaptation Name Change: Since X-23 in the films refers to a project consisting of several subjects as opposed to an individual cloning attempt, her serial number is X23-23 as opposed to just X-23. Furthermore, as Sarah Kinney was Adapted Out, there's no one to give her comics surname. The closest she's given to a last name in the film is "Howlett," when Logan introduces her as his daughter to the Munsons.
• Age Lift: Averted. X-23 was created for X-Men: Evolution as a Canon Immigrant, and was indeed a little kid there, unlike the teenager she was when introduced to the comics and other later incarnations.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Laura demonstrates a fascination with horses at several points in the film. She rides a coin-op pony at the convenience store right after the first fight with the Reavers, can be seen clutching a toy horse while she sleeps in the limo, and later in the film is drawn to the Munson family's herd. She also has a unicorn on the shirt she wears throughout the second half of the film.
• Armed Legs: As is her comics counterpart, she's "armed" with an extra claw in each foot.
• Ascended Fangirl: She read the X-Men comics in her spare time, and she ends up going on an adventure with the real Professor X and Wolverine.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Laura has two settings in combat: "kill everything that moves" and "tactical withdrawal". Unless it's a potentially lethal injury or she's at a major disadvantage, she will not stop until she's standing in the middle of a field of dead bodies and severed limbs.
• Badass Adorable: Laura is tiny and cute. She's also fully capable of unleashing a world of hurt on grown men twice her size, and is even able to put up a good fight against X-24.
• Badass and Child Duo: With Wolverine, but given she's adapting X-23 from the comics, she is as deadly as Logan himself, if not even more so due to the bad shape he's in at the time.
• Berserk Button: There's very little that doesn't set her off, particularly early in the film when she's in an almost constant state of fight or flight, and ready to respond with violence to any perceived threat. Even something as innocuous as a store clerk trying to relieve her of food she was eating without paying for is responded to with lethal force.
• The Berserker: She is capable of casing the situation and applying basic tactics to compensate for her own physical shortcomings before she attacks, but as soon as actual combat breaks out, Laura turns into a screaming hurricane of blades, blood, and destruction that will stop at nothing until the threat has been neutralized. Shoot her, beat her, toss her around like a ragdoll — it doesn't even slow her down. Injure her badly enough or gain the upper hand and she may retreat, but if you follow her, you die, because that injury won't be a problem for long. Her fighting style, while horrifically deadly, is even more aggressive and feral than Logan's, and that's saying something.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Laura doesn't speak much, and not at all for the first half of the film. She's also a highly-trained ball of murderous fury when she's set off, fully capable of cutting through heavily armed grown men like tissue paper.
• Big Eater: If dinner with the Munsons is anything to go by. She starts by shoveling mashed potatoes into her mouth with her bare hands before Logan corrects her, and then proceeds to dish out enormous scoops of corn onto her plate before Logan takes the bowl and spoon away. After dinner, her face positively lights up when Kathryn Munson asks if she wants dessert, and when Logan is on his way out the door to help Will fix the water, he has to stop her when she tries to go back for more pie after everything has been cleared away. Earlier in the film, she wolfs down corn flakes when she first meets Charles (and even continues eating when the Reavers arrive to take her into custody), and one of the first things she does following that fight, (after her ride on the coin-op pony) is to raid a convenience store for a snack. Justified: Not only is she a growing child who's barely had a decent meal in at least two days, but the common interpretation is that her Healing Factor comes with a heightened metabolism requiring more calories to begin with.
• Bilingual Bonus: She can speak Spanish, and chooses not to speak English to Logan because he kept insulting her, so she decided to be quiet and get back at him by speaking in a language he doesn't understand. During the initial shooting of that scene, she apparently called Logan a "cunt" in Spanish.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Xavier posits that the arrangement of Laura's claws are this, likening her to a lioness: The front claws are for hunting, the rear claws for defense. As noted under Mythology Gag below, this was actually the intent of Chris Yost and Craig Kyle, and Xavier's lecture is drawn from their own remarks on the matter.
• Break the Cutie: Laura goes through a lot throughout the film, but the ultimate kicker is when she watches her biological father Logan die.
• Broken Bird: Although not to the same extent as her comics counterpart, Laura is nonetheless an emotionally-damaged young girl. It's most evident in her conversation with Logan while he's recuperating in Eden about the fact that people have hurt her.
• Child by Rape: Zander Rice and Donald Pierce had several Mexican girls impregnated with embryos against their will, causing them to give birth to Laura and her mutant friends at Transigen.
• Combat Parkour: She practices this extensively, using the terrain, furniture, vehicles, and even other mooks to reach targets that are on average twice her size. Considering she's a tiny eleven-year-old girl and thus not able to absorb the same level of punishment as Logan, she also uses it to just plain not get hit, flipping, cartwheeling, and somersaulting through return fire. Her acrobatics also help her bring her foot claws into play, turning her into a whirling, adamantium-coated human blender.
• Combat Pragmatist: Although she's a highly skilled fighter, she has to be this because her small size puts her at a significant disadvantage in a straight fight. Laura has no problems attacking knees, groins, throats, or any other target. This might be considered "dirty fighting", but it allows her to make up for her lack of strength and durability. She'll drag Mooks into areas with plenty of cover where she can ambush and pick them off one-by-one, and will strike In the Back if the opportunity presents itself. She attacks X-24 twice while he's occupied, gaining a sizable initial advantage that allows her to inflict a significant amount of damage before he finally throws her off, and has no compunctions against grabbing a gun and adamantium bullet to finish him off.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: She's never once referred to as X-23 or X-23-23 in dialogue, and the designation appears on-screen only once, when Logan skims over Transigen's files. She's simply called Laura throughout the film.
• Constantly Curious: Having been born and raised in a lab, Laura has a severely limited understanding of the world outside of Transigen. As a result, she tends to regard new situations either as a threat or this, studying them closely and with great interest. She's particularly fascinated by Nate Munson, as he's the first normal child she has ever met. Laura can be seen staring at him closely several times throughout the dinner scene, and is fascinated by his music player.
• Cool Shades: She swipes a pair of pink and blue sunglasses covered in winking pink cupcakes^note Shopkins Cupcake sunglasses, in fact from a convenience store, and can be seen wearing them at various points throughout the film. Despite them being pink-and-blue kiddie shades, she still makes them look badass◊.
• Creepy Child: Laura can be very unnerving. Early in the film she's skittish, cagey, and constantly analyzing her surroundings, like an animal in unfamiliar territory. It's not helped by the fact she doesn't talk for much of the film. Even after she does begin to speak, and her more human behaviors begin to show through as she relaxes her guard around Logan, she never quite abandons her more animal-like traits.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: Laura doesn't speak much (see below), but however tiny and adorable she is, her screams in combat can be positively chilling.
• Cute Mute: Played with. She's positively adorable, and doesn't speak a word for the first half of the film, giving one the impression that she's unable to speak. After Charles' death, she reveals she can talk after all, though an initial angry rant in Spanish aside she still tends not to speak at length.
• Deadpan Snarker: While she's not usually prone to humor (or to speaking at all, for that matter), Laura inherited Logan's sense of bitter sarcasm, especially when she's disappointed with him.
  Logan: Hey, I got you here. That's all I signed up for. I even gave back the money.
  Laura: Such a nice man.
• Decapitation Presentation: She throws the head of one of Donald Pierce's Mooks at him before showing Logan that she's an incredibly dangerous mutant.
• Decomposite Character: After a fashion. She is depicted as one subject of the X-23 project (given the designation X-23-23) instead of a single person named "X-23."
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Mangold deliberately made her mute for the first half of the film to subvert the sardonic Kid Hero trope, while also choosing to cast a young child rather than the older "hot" actress in a sexy costume that has become so prevalent in the genre.
  • Laura is pretty much what you'd actually get if you tried to train a child into an emotionless killing machine. When introduced she's virtually feral, responds violently when she feels threatened, and all but panics at the sound of a passing locomotive. Laura also shows extensive signs of stunted emotional development, evidenced by many of her behaviors, such as punching every button on an elevator, which is something you'd expect from a five-year-old instead of an eleven-year-old. While she's certainly a highly-skilled and frighteningly efficient killer, she's still just a preteen girl fighting grown men twice or more her size; Laura can be subdued by sheer weight of numbers, and when an opponent does land a solid hit on her (such as X-24 throwing her against a wall) she goes down hard (though God help you once she gets back up).
• Determinator: No matter what you do to her, Laura does. Not. Stop. Shoot her with a harpoon, overwhelm her with sheer numbers, blast her with a painful psychic wave, or even put her up against a ruthless emotionless killing machine more than twice her size, and she will continue to fight until either everything around her is dead, or she finally takes a strong enough hit to put her down. Exaggerated even further by the fact she's an eleven-year-old girl.
• Deuteragonist: Laura straddles the line between this and tritagonist in Logan, with Mangold directly describing her as the "third leg of the table." While she is the instigator of the pain Logan and Charles endure over the course of the film,^note Logan's involvement with her brings him into conflict with Pierce and Transigen, which leads to the deaths of Caliban, Charles, the Munson family, and ultimately himself unlike the classical tritagonist she's perhaps the most sympathetic character because of her lack of intent and the fact she's as much a victim (if not more so) of the events as the others. However, the size of her role and significance to the plot, particularly during the film's second half, also leans much more towards her being the deuteragonist, particularly as without Laura, there is no story.
• Disproportionate Retribution: She nearly filets a convenience store clerk for grabbing her arm to stop her shoplifting; Logan has to stop her and make it clear that that is not okay. Justified; due to Laura's conditioning, she had no idea what would be a proportionate response, and she reacted on animalistic instinct.
• Eloquent In Their Native Tongue: While Laura can speak and understand English perfectly well, she's clearly more comfortable with Spanish, defaulting to that and giving most of her longest pieces of dialogue in that language.
• Fragile Speedster: She's incredibly fast and small, making her hard to hit. However, despite her incredible endurance, she's still an eleven-year-old girl who can't take hits the way Logan can, and a few men can easily hold her down if they're given the opportunity and/or overpower her with sheer strength.
• Girly Bruiser: She likes ponies and the color pink, has an adorable-sounding voice, and will rip your head off if you cross her.
• Gone Horribly Right: As far as Pierce and Zander Rice are concerned. Transigen wanted to make a Human Weapon killing machine. While the other X-23 kids largely failed to live up to this (see Children Are Innocent under the general section above), with Laura they succeeded. Unfortunately for them.
• Groin Attack: Given her Combat Pragmatist tendencies and the fact that the people she faces are mostly men, she gives plenty of these usually with her knees or the claws in her feet.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Of all the Transigen kids, she's the quickest to respond violently if threatened. It's In the Blood.
• Hero-Worshipper: Implied when Logan finds that she owns comic books based on the X-Men's adventures.
• Howl of Sorrow: She gives an incredibly broken and angered one after witnessing Charles die.
• Humanity Ensues: Early in the film, Laura is skittish and very shy, often behaving like an animal in unfamiliar territory. Over the course of the film, and through her contact with Logan and Charles, her human traits become much more evident.
• Humanity Is Infectious: At the beginning of the film, Laura acts more like a wild animal than a person, and her relative obedience toward Logan and Xavier can probably be chalked up to her pack mentality and obeying those above her in the hierarchy. It's only through prolonged exposure to them that she actually starts to act like a normal child.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Pierce shoots Laura in the back with a spear gun in the fight at the industrial yard in the beginning. The projectile penetrates so deeply it punches all the way through her body, with a solid foot of it emerging from her chest. She shrugs it off with only a harrowing shriek thanks to her Healing Factor, and goes right back to kicking ass once she cuts herself free.
• In the Blood: Children Are Innocent aside, she's nonetheless got the most vicious temper and is quickest to respond to violence when threatened of the X-23 experiments. She is Logan's daughter, after all.
• The Ingenue: In a Freeze-Frame Bonus, Laura's Transigen records give her an emotional IQ of between 70-78 months, suggesting she's emotionally on par with a six-year-old child. This is supported by the film itself, in which Laura demonstrates behavior more appropriate for a much younger child than her 11 years.
• Intergenerational Friendship: The 11-year-old Laura forms a strong bond with the 90-year-old Charles Xavier, getting along much better with him than she does with the much surlier (and even older) Logan. She tears into X-24 after he stabs Charles, and is both heartbroken and enraged when she sees that Charles succumbed to the wound.
• Jabba Table Manners: The kid does not know how to eat in polite company. When dining with the Munsons, she stuffs fistfuls of mashed potatoes in her mouth until Logan corrects her, and scoops big helpings of corn from the bowl as it's passed around the table.
• Killer Rabbit: She's as cute as a button, but she's also fully capable (and willing) of disemboweling entire battalions of armed soldiers.
• Kubrick Stare: Laura delivers a positively withering one to Pierce at Logan's hideout when she heads towards him and tosses the head of one of his Reavers at his feet. The fact it's being delivered with aplomb by an eleven-year-old girl just makes it even more chilling.
• Lighter and Softer: Just a tad, as she is still a cute little murder machine, but Laura in the comics was well into her teens by the time she met up with Logan: before that she had lived a hard life on the streets, and had even been a sex worker. In fact, most of Laura's backstory in the movie is a watered-down and "nicer" version then the pure hell she went through in the source material. Point in fact, she only kills bad guys in the film, while comic Laura was forced to kill hundreds of innocent people, including children.
• Little Miss Badass: She's less than half of the size of the heavily-armed cyborgs she rips to shreds in visceral Mook Horror Show glory. She also gives one hell of a fight to X-24. However, Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes occur at several points in the movie: for all her training, Laura is still just a child. When she doesn't have room to maneuver or the element of surprise, or is simply weighed down by sheer numbers, she's all but helpless against a grown man. And if an opponent does get a hit in, she usually goes down hard.
• Living MacGuffin: A substantial part of the movie's plot is driven by Pierce and the Reavers attempting to recapture her.
• Luke, You Are My Father: Xavier casually reveals that she's Logan's "daughter" right after they escape from the border with her.
• Madness Mantra: Averted. When she starts naming all of her X-23 friends who are waiting for her, Logan asks her in annoyance who they are, but she just repeats their names over and over.
• Magic Pants: She has claws on both her hands and legs. Still, her shoes do not seem to have noticeable big holes or otherwise get damaged after she uses her foot claws.
• Menacing Stroll: She pulls an epic one combined with Decapitation Presentation, The Gloves Come Off, and Kubrick Stare. After Pierce sends a couple mooks into Logan's home to retrieve her, Laura emerges alone and tosses the head of one of the Reavers at Pierce's feet. Then she throws away the cuffs the guy had been carrying. And casts aside her backpack. Then the claws come out. All while stalking towards Pierce and an army of men twice her size with murder in her eyes. It's made even more badass by the fact it's being done by an eleven year-old girl, and Keen completely sells it.
• Missing Mom: Unlike her comics counterpart, the identity of Laura's mother is never revealed, and isn't particularly significant to the story. It's implied that after the impregnated women gave birth, they were disposed of.
• Mook Horror Show: She doesn't just cut through the Reavers in a blind rage like Logan does when they invade his hideout; no, she methodically hunts them, further underscoring her strongly predatory vibes.
• Mysterious Waif: Charles tasks Logan with safeguarding her from the nebulous organization that wishes to capture her and use her for their own ends.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In Logan, all of the Transigen children are part of a series of genetically-engineered mutants with a serial number beginning X-23. Laura's serial number is X-23-23, as a nod to the fact that Laura is the X-23 in the comics.
  • When Xavier gives his rambling Info Dump about Laura's claw arrangement, comparing her to a lioness and explaining the purpose of the foot claws, he's using Kyle and Yost's own words on the matter.
  • Laura is shown experimentally cutting herself with her newly-bonded adamantium claws in Gabriela's video. When she first appeared in the comics, Laura regularly practiced Self-Harm by cutting herself with her claws in times of emotional duress.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: She gives one to X-24 in the forest battle, which is probably one of the most brutal examples in media, where she constantly slashes and impales him with blood going everywhere, with X-24 unable to do anything to her. Just when it seems it's over after he finally gets her off him, she blows half his skull off with an adamantium bullet.
• No Social Skills: She's barely able to function in civilized society at the start, and doesn't grasp simple concepts like "pay for goods if they are for sale" or "don't violently attack people who reprimand you". Even after she starts to act like a person instead of a wild animal, she is still incredibly immature, and displays behaviors that you would expect from a preschool-aged child, not a preteen. Given the harshness of her institutionalized upbringing and the hell Transigen put her through, it's a wonder she's this normal.
• Older Than They Look: Downplayed, but while Laura is 11, you'd be forgiven for thinking she's even younger because of her diminutive height and behavior and mannerisms much more appropriate for a child half her age. As with Logan himself, eventually she'll play this trope much straighter as she grows up.
• One-Woman Army: It's very clear once she shows her powers that no one is a match for her except X-24. She rips apart most of Transigen's troops in a couple of minutes.
• Parents in Distress: When X-24 kills Charles, Laura, who came to view him as a surrogate grandfather, gets violent and furiously leaps on his back with claws flashing, even though he's twice her size. He's only able to defeat and subdue her because she has no room to maneuver. Later in the film she does it again to protect her actual father, Logan, and this time subjects him to a positively brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. X-24 only manages to shake her off when he lands a lucky blow (she is only eleven years old). She ultimately delivers the fatal blow via an adamantium bullet to his noggin when he tries to finish off the mortally-wounded Logan.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: At a mere four feet tall, she is tiny, yet she has no trouble throwing around guys almost twice her size.
• The Quiet One: She doesn't speak very much, particularly in the first half of the movie, to the point Logan assumes that she can't talk at all and freaks out when she actually talks in Spanglish two-thirds of the way through the movie.
• Race Lift: A subdued example: in X-Men: Evolution she's Ambiguously Brown, whereas her comics version is Caucasian. Dafne Keen is Caucasian of Anglo-Spaniard descent. Whereas in the comics she's an Opposite-Sex Clone of Logan, in the film she's the result of Transigen using his genetic material to impregnate an unknown Mexican woman. This is emphasized by her Mexican accent. Obviously she picked it up from the nurses rather than it being genetic, but the symbolism is still clear.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Despite being only eleven, Laura is a highly-skilled fighter and ruthless killer when pressed, and is fully capable of operating a vehicle and properly using firearms. Unfortunately, it's left her social development and skills severely lacking: she aggressively defends herself against a store clerk who tries to take away food she's eating without paying for (and probably would have violently attacked the pissed-off hotel employee had Gabriela not managed to talk their way out of it), starts pushing all the buttons on a hotel elevator as would be expected of a child much younger than her, and simply can't eat in polite company.
• Screaming Warrior: In spite of her quiet demeanor, Laura is a fierce screamer when the claws come out.
• Security Blanket: Laura's backpack has shades of this. She carries it with her in almost every scene, and gets very clingy and protective of it when Logan tries to nose through it without permission.
• Self-Harm: She is seen on a video recording cutting herself and watching the injuries heal while she's an experimental subject in a Transigen lab.
• Shadow Archetype: What was supposed to have become, and what she still would have become to Logan had she remained on the run without Logan and Xavier's influence: a bestial killer with a completely inhuman thought process who views people either as prey to slaughter or as nuisances to avoid if they stay out of her way or to eliminate if they hinder her progress.
• Suddenly Voiced: She spends a good half of the film completely silent, aside from grunts and screams when she fights. She suddenly speaks after, as Logan put it, "2000 fucking miles", and lays a lot of Spanish on Logan, which annoys him. Then she's revealed she does speak a bit of English, but not too well.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As noted under Deconstructed Character Archetype above, for all her skills as a fighter, Laura is still just a child fighting grown men twice or more her size. When she gets hit, she goes down hard, and can be overwhelmed without room to maneuver or the element of surprise.
• Super-Strength: Not as noticeable as Logan's, given that she's only 11, but Laura is still strong enough to flip and knock down grown men when she fights.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: It would be more accurate to describe Laura as an animal that walks on two legs than as a child. She's a pretty accurate look at what you'd actually get if you raised someone with a bestial mutation (which may or may not explain some of her animalistic behavior) as a weapon and deprived them of basic human nurturing: an utterly merciless killer motivated solely by survival who is in a permanent state of fight-or-flight and reacts violently to perceived threats. That unnerving gaze that she always seems to have? That's her monitoring her environment for threats, sizing them up, and coming up with plans of action in case they disturb her.
• True Blue Femininity: Laura's primary color palette throughout the film is blue. When Logan meets her she's wearing a pale blue hoodie (initially under a pink jacket, which she loses during the first fight with the Reavers), and she later gets a blue denim jacket and jeans paired with a rainbow unicorn shirt. Even the Cool Shades she shoplifts at the convenience store have lots of blue, with pink added in for good measure, and the robe she briefly wears while cleaning up at the casino hotel is also blue. It all helps lend a little more of a girlish look to her otherwise rather tomboyish costuming.
• Truer to the Text: This version of Laura is closer to the Ambiguously Brown little girl with brown hair from X-Men: Evolution, as opposed to the black-haired, clearly Caucasian teenager the comics introduced.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Transigen bred her to be a Human Weapon. They also abused and mistreated her quite severely. By the time Gabriela frees her, Laura has no compunction against slaughtering any Transigen mook within claw's reach, to the point of finishing off one wounded by Logan that doesn't even present a threat.
• The Voiceless: She appears to be a Cute Mute for the first half of the movie, though Charles Xavier is apparently communicating with her via telepathy. After Charles dies, Logan gets a shock when Laura throws a rapid-fire diatribe in Spanish at him. According to Word of God, her silence was to avoid the character becoming the usual sardonic Kid Sidekick. Additionally, if you speak Spanish or have access to a translation of her first rant, it's revealed that Laura chose to remain silent around Logan; when she blows up at him she pointedly asks why he expects her to talk to him, when all he's done the entire film is yell at her, insult her, or try to abandon her.
• Tyke Bomb: She's spent her entire life being conditioned to be nothing more than a killing machine, and can be downright terrifying when she fights.
• Waif-Fu: Owing to her small size and youth, Laura relies on her speed, agility, and skills in a fight rather than raw power, dancing around her opponents, crippling them with precise strikes, with a very acrobatic fighting style often incorporating Colossus Climb to contend with threats larger than her. While she is significantly stronger than the average 11-year-old of her size and stature, that can likely be attributed to a mix of her healing factor and the sheer amount of adrenaline rushing through her system.
• Weak, but Skilled: Laura is a very skilled fighter, fully capable of taking down grown men almost twice her size and briefly managing to overwhelm X-24. While she's not weak by any given stretch, she's still just an 11-year-old girl who is slightly stronger than someone her age. She relies either on having enough room to maneuver that she can't get pinned down, or an environment where she can use the terrain to her advantage to pick them off one-by-one. Once her opponents' superior strength comes into play, she's much more vulnerable.
• When She Smiles: Laura is very serious and dour throughout the movie, and even playing with her ball or riding on the coin-op pony can't elicit so much as a giggle out of her. However the small smile she gives Xavier the first time she sees the big city lights and neon signs makes her face positively light up, and she gives another one (along with some laughter) when they have dinner with the Munsons; both of these instances serve to show the sweet little girl she never got the chance to be.
• Wild Child: She's just as vicious as Logan during a fight, and her reaction to a store clerk trying to take the things she wasn't paying for is to flip him over and very nearly kill him. She's all but feral early in the film and gives off distinctly predatory vibes, and doesn't even speak until after Charles is killed by X-24.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Laura zig-zags the trope throughout the film. She can go from casually gutting a mercenary one moment to punching every button in an elevator like you would expect from a child a third of her age in the next. The extent of her training by Transigen is unclear, but at the very least she's fully capable of safely operating a vehicle and using firearms; on the other hand, her emotional development took a backseat, and she is by far and large shockingly immature in social situations.
• Wolverine Claws: She packs two small claws in both hands, along with one in each of her feet.
• Wolverine Wannabe: Like her comics counterpart, Laura possesses Logan's Healing Factor, claws, and (implied) enhanced senses, agility, and strength. Unlike her, however, this iteration may be even more feral than Logan himself, as she responds violently to even perceived threats, including a hapless store clerk who simply tried to keep her from shoplifting food.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Her fighting scenes through the film feature at least a Lou Thesz press and a flying armbar, along with many cartwheels and takedowns.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: While not in those exact words, the spirit of the trope comes up twice:
  • The first time Charles chides Logan when he swears in front of Laura. When Logan points out that she had just slaughtered several heavily-armed soldiers so should be able to handle a few curse words, Charles retorts that she can learn to be better than that.
    Logan: Better than me?
    Charles: Actually, yes!
  • The second time is Logan's dying message to Laura. He tells her "Don't be what they made you," encouraging her to become a better person than the cold-hearted killer Transigen wanted her to be.

Rictor

Julio Richter / Rictor

"We're gonna cross the border. It's a safe haven."

Played by: Jason Genao

Voiced by: Julio Morín (Latin-American Spanish)

Film Appearances: Logan

One of Transigen's X-23 series experiments, Rictor appears to be running the Eden hideout where the kids were meant to rendezvous before making their escape into Canada. He has the power to create seismic waves.

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• Age Lift: Rictor is a young adult in the comics; here he's either a pre-teen or just entering his teens.
• Defiant Captive: When Pierce is holding him at gunpoint, Rictor just shouts "waste this dick, Logan!".
• Dishing Out Dirt: His mutant power allows him to generate seismic waves, creating earthquakes or simply moving dirt around.
• The Leader: He appears to be among the oldest of the X-23 children, and seems to be looked to as their de facto leader.
• Meaningful Name: His mutant power is to create seismic waves, he goes by the code-name Rictor, and his last name is Richter. As in, the Richter scale. Which measures earthquakes.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Pierce wings him in the final pursuit, and makes a point of telling him as much when he's taken into custody.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Rictor is only referred to as Rictor in the film, rather than by his given name. Whether Rictor is a nickname or has been altered to be his actual name for the film is unknown.
• Mythology Gag: His files lists Dominic Petros, a.k.a. Avalanche, as his DNA source.
• Race Lift: Sort of. Unlike many of the other X-23 kids, Julio Richter is actually Mexican in the comics, just as is his incarnation in the film, though his source DNA came from a character who is traditionally Greek.
• Related in the Adaptation: Outside of having similar powers, Avalanche and Rictor aren't related. Here, much like Wolverine to Laura, Dominic Petros^note which itself in an alias in the comics, as his real name is Dominikos Petrakis is Rictor's DNA source and hence his biological father.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: His experiences in the Transigen experiments forced him to grow up much too fast, and he serves as a sort of father figure for the other kids in Eden. He seems to be the one running things and planning the next stage of their flight, and even offers to make good on Gabriela's offer of additional payment for safely delivering Laura.

Other X-23 Children

Film Appearances: Logan

While mutants were disappearing throughout the world, Transigen secretly used genetic material harvested from them to artificially inseminate an unknown number of young Mexican women, for the purpose of breeding mutants directly under their control in hopes of correcting the main flaw in Weapon X: his independence.

---

• Artificial Human: A downplayed example. All of the kids were created by impregnating women with genetic material harvested from other mutants. However unlike X-23 in the books and X-24 in the film, the kids aren't truly clones, and instead the process is more accurately compared to artificial insemination.
• Baby Factory: The mothers of the children are treated as disposable wombs. Gabriela doesn't elaborate on what became of them, but the implication of her remarks, "girls nobody can find," is they were killed.
• Canon Foreigner: Although several of the kids have powers inspired by canon characters (and one is confirmed to be the "son" of a canon character), with the exception of Laura and Rictor none of them are actually adapted from the comics themselves.
• Children Are Innocent: This is why Transigen and Rice ultimately deemed the X-23 project a failure: although they were able to turn the kids into weapons, they weren't able to actually make them kill, as (most of) the children resisted any such conditioning to break their natural empathy.
• Child Soldiers: What Transigen wanted them to be. Unfortunately, because of Children Are Innocent, they weren't able to actually get them to kill on command.
• Designer Babies: All the X-23 kids. They were grown to be mutants, made from mutant cells (unbeknownst to said mutants), and implanted in surrogates. The movie explains that they are test tube babies, not clones, so the differences in appearance make sense.
• The Dog Bites Back: Just because the kids didn't want to kill, doesn't mean they won't to defend themselves. Many Reavers learn that the hard way on Laura's claws, and later when trying to pursue and round up the fleeing kids in the climax. And that's before even getting into what they do to Pierce.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Thanks to the sacrifices of Logan and many others, they all get to escape to a better life in Eden.
• Electric Black Guy: One of the genetically-engineered mutant kids is a black kid with the ability to generate electricity.
• Green Thumb: The power of one of the X-23 girls allows her to control various forms of plant life.
• An Ice Person: One of the kids is a girl with ice abilities, possibly indicating that her DNA source was Logan's former X-Men teammate Bobby Drake, a.k.a. Iceman.
• Kiddie Kid: Slightly downplayed: when Logan looks at Bobby's^note the heavy-set black boy with electrical powers file, it indicates an emotional age of about 72-78 months, suggesting he has the emotional maturity of a child around 6 years of age. Bobby himself is somewhere around Laura's age, suggesting that his emotional growth has been stunted, likely as a result of his treatment by Transigen. Given what we see of Laura's behavior, it's highly likely that all the X-23 children have similarly stunted emotional development.
• Human Weapon: What Transigen intended them to be. However, the children's natural empathy made them impossible to control in such a manner.
• Mind Manipulation: One of the kids shows the ability to mind control a Reaver soldier, mimicking his movements as he fires the gun and turns it on himself.
• Mythology Gag: All of the kids have a serial number in the format X-23-##. This is how Alchemax identified The Sisters in All-New Wolverine.
• Tyke Bomb: The X-23 program was created to produce and raise living weapons.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • The fate of the kids' mothers; young Mexican girls who were taken, impregnated by Transigen, and then disappeared once they had given birth.
  • When Transigen determined the project wasn't going to pan out, they decided to euthanize them. Fortunately, many of the nurses rebelled and helped them escape instead.
• You Remind Me of X: Logan remarks that the other kids seem nice and remind him of someone, but Laura cuts him off before he can say who. Given the context, he may have been about to refer to the students of the Xavier school.

X-24

X-24

Played by: Hugh Jackman

Film Appearances: Logan

"We struggled with the X-23s. We assumed because they are children, we could raise them without a conscience. But you can't nurture rage. You simply design it...from scratch."

— Dr. Zander Rice

Transigen's greatest weapon, born from stolen research from the Weapon X program run by William Stryker in the '70s. After the Reavers fail to successfully run Logan, Laura, and Xavier to ground, Rice orders X-24 unleashed to finish the job.

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• Ax-Crazy: He is violent and bloodthirsty, and no-one except Rice can control him, and even then, when provoked, X-24 is shown to be very prone to indiscriminate slaughter even with Rice shouting for him to settle down.
• The Bad Guy Wins: X-24 succeeds in defeating Logan by stabbing him in the chest with a tree stump and his claws several times. Even though he's shot to death in the head by Laura, the wounds that he inflicted are fatal enough for Logan to die as a result.
• Berserk Button: Any attack on him or Rice sets him off.
• The Berserker: He's nothing but feral rage that can only be pointed in the right direction by Rice. After Rice gets killed by Logan, Pierce takes up the slack.
• Boom, Headshot!: Twice. The first time happens as a result of Will Munson unloading an entire shotgun into him, although this doesn't kill him and he heals after being given a serum. The second time, Laura blows off half his head with an adamantium bullet, finally killing him.
• The Brute: He has all the muscle of Wolverine in his prime, but he lacks both the intelligence and the conscience. Rice and Pierce bring him in when Laura, Logan, and Charles prove too much for their regular forces.
• Canon Foreigner: He was created solely for this film, serving as a personification of Logan's worst fears about himself becoming a feral beast.
• Dragon Their Feet: After Rice is killed, Pierce lets him in out in a final bid to kill Logan. Even when Pierce gets killed by the mutant children, their efforts to stop X-24 prove fruitless, as he successfully murders Logan afterwards.
• Dumb Muscle: He appears to have little understanding of anything except fighting. When encountering the ranchers, he just stares at them until attacked, which sets off his Berserk Button.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Dr. Rice, his creator, is the only person X-24 listens to. He gets angry at Logan for killing Rice with Pierce goading him on.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • He's what Logan would be without any humanity, control, or empathy. Visually, X-24 resembles Victor Creed, who was previously Logan's dark mirror.
  • Also one to Laura: his relationship with his creator has vague parental overtones, and when he finds out Wolverine killed Rice he goes ballistic.
• Evil Knockoff: To Logan. Not only is X-24 physically an exact replica of Logan, he embodies all his feral rage, with none of his humanity. X-24 is the weapon that Weapon X tried to convert Logan into, and an embodiment of the animal side Victor wanted Logan to embrace. Both battles between Logan and X-24 have been directly compared to Logan fighting the Wolverine.
• Evil Twin: For Logan, though Charles dubs him as Logan's son.
• Feral Villain: He seems to lack any capacity for rational thought, existing solely to kill whatever his masters want him to.
• Final Boss: After Rice and Pierce bite it, he's the very last threat that Wolverine and the X-23 mutants have to face, and, in the former's case, is also the very last person Wolverine fights in his life.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: He wears a black tank top to contrast with Logan's white, emphasizing his Evil Counterpart status.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Aside from being blasted in the head with a shotgun once, nothing that he gets hit with seems to slow him down up until an adamantium bullet pierces his skull.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: It really doesn't take much to set him off into a animalistic fury.
• Healing Factor: It doesn't seem to be as effective as Logan's in his prime, but it's still there. Taking heavy damage will give him trouble in healing and necessitates the use of a serum to repair himself. He also gets finished off with an adamantium bullet to the head, something Logan survived in X-Men Origins.
• Hero Killer: He fatally wounds Xavier in his very first scene, then does the same to Logan himself in the climax.
• Human Weapon: X-24 is the weapon that Stryker wanted Logan to be, and which Rice spent considerable time and resources attempting to recreate.
• Implacable Man: X-24 gets an armored truck dumped on top of him in the climax, and still gets back up.
• Morality Pet: Rice goes out of his way to comfort and heal X-24, and Rice is the only person X-24 will listen to.
• One-Man Army: Even more so than Logan, due to X-24 being nothing but unconstrained feral rage.
• Rasputinian Death: Clawed repeatedly. Pinned onto a tractor with a car. Entire shotgun unloaded into him. Truck dropped on him. And has half his skull blown off with an adamantium bullet, finally killing them.
• Shadow Archetype: He is the personification of Logan's savagery, with none of his humanity to balance out the berserker rage.
• Silent Antagonist: Zigzagged: He does plenty of animalistic screaming but never actually speaks. It's implied that he's in fact incapable of speech.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: The only hint of his existence prior to the film's release is near the end of the first teaser, when Logan is lying on his back and blocks his claws when X-24 tries to stab him in the face. Otherwise he was completely hidden from the film's marketing.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He only appears for about three scenes, two of them being fight scenes, and he's the one who kills both Professor X and Wolverine.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: His eyes are a very light shade of brown, almost yellow.
• Super-Strength: He one-handedly throws an adamantium-heavy Logan through the air with little to no effort, donkey-kicks him over a parked Humvee, and easily lifts an armored truck up and off himself after being crushed by it moments before.
• Tragic Monster: He has no free will or choice in the terrible, murderous things he does, and was a slave created by Alkali-Transigen only to feel rage and obey the one holding his leash. He serves as Logan's Evil Counterpart, showing what he would have been if he hadn't managed to escape Weapon X or found stability, family, and friends with the X-Men.
• Unskilled, but Strong:
  • It's subtly signaled that while he is stronger and faster, Logan still has the edge of skill and experience on him. If Logan had been in good health, he'd have a much easier time dealing with X-24, and even Laura manages to briefly overwhelm him despite a massive disparity in size and strength.
  • It's implied that X-24's creation (accelerated clone growth in lab tanks) has left him with no skills other than violent animal instincts and very broad conditioning to obey Rice. X-24 is carted around from task to task and doesn't seem to appreciate the context of anything that's happening apart from when Logan kills Rice, which doesn't encourage the development of fighting skills.
• Unstoppable Rage: When someone triggers him, he's a violent tempest of feral, psychotic destruction and hate killing everything and anything in his path. Just ask Logan after 24's sight of Rice's dead body, plus a little goading from Pierce.
• Walking Spoiler: He is not seen in any of the film's advertisements and was not revealed to be in the movie at all until the soundtrack list leaked. Even then, said soundtrack list didn't reveal that the character was a younger clone of Wolverine.
• Wham Shot: The first shot of him in the film is when he murders Xavier and kidnaps Laura, all the while Xavier says how great this night has been. To say nothing of the first time we clearly see his face and that he looks like Logan.
• Wolverine Claws: Just like Logan's, naturally.
• Wolverine Wannabe: Considering he is a clone of the man himself, this is to be expected. X-24 has been perfected as a Living Weapon without any traces of humanity, resembling the savage side of Logan that he tries to hard to suppress and how Weapon X intended him to be.
• Would Hit a Girl: Not only does he recapture Laura, he casually slaughters Kathryn Munson when she tries to interfere, to say nothing of fighting Laura in the climax (though to be fair, Laura was giving him no quarter, and viciously attacked him). This prompts him to smack her upside the head, knocking her out.
• Would Hurt a Child: He murders Nate Munson when he comes to investigate Laura's screams after X-24 kills Charles, and he and Laura get into a vicious battle in the climax where he doesn't pull his punches (not that Laura was holding back, either, spending a substantial part of the fight ripping him to shreds).
• You Killed My Father: X-24 does not take it well when he learns Logan killed Rice.
  Pierce: [Logan] did that, get up!

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