X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

3 November 2006 by Gnoll One Comment

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

2005, dir. Brett Ratner
104 min. Rated PG-13.
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, Sir Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, Vinnie Jones .

Review by Gnoll

It’s not often that I choose to rebut the views of one of my fellow contributors here at MCFTR. Hell, it’s not often that I find time to write anything to begin with. However, I have to take issue with a recent review posted by our own Baldy. Now, I realize that I’m quite a few months out of date, but at least this will get timed relatively close to the DVD release. The film, of course, is the latest dish served up from Marvel, X3.

I’m too lazy to think of another joke to go here.

Now, For the record, I loved the first two X-films. The first film took a few liberties with canon, but that’s always to be expected. However, it turned out a great introduction that kept the spirit of the comic series alive. I gave a glowing review to X2, praising director Bryan Singer for inputting his personal struggle into the lives of the characters.

When I heard Singer was leaving the X-Men franchise in favor of Superman Returns, I was actually kind of mad at him. While Superman is far more iconic, I’ve always had a preference toward the “everyday” superhero, and I cared more about X3 than I did the latest Superman flick. When I found out he was being replaced by Brett Ratner, whose only skill seems to be making buddy action/comedies with Chris Tucker, I was beyond pissed at Singer. Why would you abandon something that you nurtured into a classic pair of films only to let a piece of garbage hack like Ratner sully the third installment?

Well, I went in to X3 expecting the worst. And surprisingly, what I got wasn’t quite the flaming turd I thought it would be. In many ways, it was better. I mean, there were a handful of things I thought they managed to pull off really well in X3. The short list of the good looks a little like this:

1. Beast. They did a damn good job on Beast. The balance between reserved genius and untamed animal was achieved just about perfectly. Kelsey Grammer did a great job capturing the character. The joke with the old-style jacket was actually funny. And they even managed to work in an “oh, my stars and garters” to appease the hardcore fanboys.

2. Cyclops. They offed him pretty early on, and while I’m pretty sure a lot of people were pissed that they took that liberty, Scott Summers was always an annoying little prick and James Mardsen didn’t do a whole lot to help win me over to his side.

3. Phoenix. It’s really hard to try and shove the Phoenix subplot into a movie this short, but they managed to do an all right job of it. Famke Janssen never really did much for me either way as Jean Grey in the first two films, but she did a hell of a job here.

That’s really about it. Like I said, this wasn’t the worst movie I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t even the worst comic book movie I’d ever seen. It’s still leaps and bounds above The Fantastic Four, for instance. But it’s probably on par with Daredevil. And that’s quite a few pegs below where it needs to be.

You have to chalk this up to the difference between who Ratner is vs. who Singer is to begin with. Not only is Singer a polished director who cut his teeth making independent films versus the studio hack that Ratner has been since day one, but Singer understands diversity. Singer is openly homosexual, and understands the stigma of being shunned and derided by society. The X-Men are characters who share that stigma, so he was able to relate to the material. Ratner is pretty the exact opposite — he exudes that boorish masculinity that one might expect from a high school jock. Thus, he approaches the material from the guise of an action vehicle, rather than a personal, character-driven story.

So what sucked about X3? Well, if I were to list them like I did above, the list wouldn’t be that long. It’s just that certain elements made a huge negative impact on my enjoyment on the film as a whole.

For starters, there was the problem with too many characters. Colossus barely gets any screen time, Kitty Pride is given a one-dimensional character, and most of the new members of the Brotherhood don’t even get named in the film itself before being offed. Juggernaut is a complete joke, and his now-infamous one-liner is absolutely ridiculous. Angel is promised as the next big thing in the movie hype, but barely even has any screen time.

And then there’s the uselessness of bringing in Angel to begin with. The whole reason they even needed him was to introduce his father, who would be a much more consequential character to begin with. And after his two minutes of screen time early on, he shows up at Mutant Academy for no explicable reason only to come out of nowhere at the end to save his father’s life. Why even bother introducing him, if you’re not going to even use him? If they even did one-tenth of the job they did introducing Nightcrawler in the second movie, then they’d have done better than they did.

They try to remedy this by killing off characters. Now, I didn’t mind seeing Cyclops go. One main character’s death isn’t a problem. It’s when they de-mutantize Mystique, and then kill off Xavier, and then the stuff that happens at the end that I’ll get into later, tha tthe real trouble begins.

But the biggest problem lies in the whole main plot — the “cure”: an antibody that converts someone with the mutant gene into a plain old human being. While I found it to be a little far-fetched and contrived plot point to begin with, I decided to live with it. But somewhere along the line, the movie forgot what it was all about.

Maybe I was reading too far in to the film, but I viewed the opposing sides of the main battle as a metaphor for the pro-life vs. pro-choice argument in modern politics. I mean, if there were metaphors for sexual identity in the first two, then why not assume there’s a grander scheme in this one as well? The “cure” represents abortion, and the different mutant factions are on opposing sides. The Brotherhood are the pro-lifers, wanting the complete elimination of the cure. Xavier’s guys are the pro-choicers, understanding that the cure is a necessary evil and fighting to give everyone the option to use it if they feel it necessary. One of their own, Rogue, even crosses the lines to have the “procedure” performed.

What gets troublesome is the ending. As the Brotherhood are trying to wipe out the “cure”, the hero mutants rage into battle. As the battle climaxes, Wolverine and Beast corner Magneto and defeat him…by going against everything they’ve just spent two hours standing for: forcing Magneto to live his life as a regular human.

All of a sudden, the rest of the movie doesn’t matter. The whole mythos gets flushed because the writers, not quite understanding the whole concept of what the X-Men stand for, decide to go with a cheap cop-out of an ending.

And even if you forgive all the rest of this film’s flaws, you just can’t get past this major plot point. This, ladies and gents, above all other reasons, is why X3 is a bad movie, and why it completely harms the rest of the franchise.