X-Men: The Last Stand Movie Review

Unlike X2, X-Men: The Last Stand is simply a blockbuster, effects-heavy summer-type of film. The movie leaves your thoughts pretty much the moment you hit the exit doors. Whereas X2 had style and substance, X-Men: The Last Stand never manages to lift itself above its set pieces. The characters we’ve grown to know and love - or despise - are reduced to being little more than chess pieces as this X-Men movie, unfortunately, is all about the special effects.

The setup for X-Men: The Last Stand revolves around a newly discovered cure for mutants. One little dose, just one little jab of a needle, and everything that sets a mutant apart from normal human beings instantly vanishes. But as Storm angrily argues when she hears the news, they don’t have a disease so there’s no reason to be cured, right? Who would want to get rid of their special powers just to blend in anyway?

Evil ringleader Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen) voices the strongest opposition to the cure, rallying other mutants and declaring war on Homo sapiens, a derogatory term he spits out with a sneer. He believes it’s a government conspiracy to rid the planet of mutants, and that the cure will not be voluntary. Magneto’s goal is to storm the facility on Alcatraz Island and secure the source of the cure, killing anyone who stands in his way - be they human or mutants.

The X-Men don’t agree with the cure but they also don’t back Magneto’s call to arms and his plan to take on the government and kill innocent people. The hero mutants also have another huge problem on their hands: Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) has come back from the dead a changed mutant and not one to be messed with. More powerful than even Magneto or Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the newly reborn ‘Phoenix’ has to be controlled or else no one will be safe.

X-Men: The Last Stand is a frustratingly shallow film. Due to the huge collection of supporting characters and a super fast 90 minute running time, wasted opportunities to probe deeper into the characters abound. Jean Grey’s return alone should easily have deserved more than the few minutes devoted to explaining her dramatic change into Phoenix. Once she’s transformed into the Phoenix persona, there’s no explanation as to why she agrees to idly stand by and play second fiddle to anyone.

There’s a complex moral issue at the heart of X3 which should have produced moments of genuine thoughtful reflection. Instead it’s all rush, rush, rush, and toss in as many unnecessary and under-utilized supporting players as possible. The more the merrier was apparently the underlying philosophy when it came to choosing who to include in X-Men: The Last Stand.

Once the studio declared the third X-Men film would be the final one (although I wasn’t convinced of that when they announced it and I’m less so after seeing X3), the screenwriters, possibly guided by studio executives, seem to have decided they needed to incorporate as many of the characters from the comics as possible to satisfy X-Men fans. In reality what that means for the film is that each character (with the exception of Halle Berry as Storm) had their screen time dramatically cut down. Oscar-winner Berry got her way and Storm is now a much larger part of the plot, with more to do than in the previous two films combined. That’s good for Berry, but not so good for the movie. Storm just isn’t the most exciting mutant. In fact, there are a couple of scenes in which focusing on other mutants, such as the underused Colossus or Beast, would have been more interesting.

Brett Ratner picked up the reins at the last minute when Bryan Singer’s replacement Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) bowed out of director duties. While that may be the reason X-Men 3 isn’t as good as its predecessors, it just as easily could be that we’d have been stuck with the same product no matter who was at the helm. I didn’t have an issue so much with Ratner’s style of directing (which is actually just an imitation of Singer’s in this case) as much as I did with a script too crammed with characters and absent any real emotional punch.

Unfortunately for Brett Ratner and 20th Century Fox, X-Men: The Last Stand follows on the heels of X2, the best film of the franchise and one of the better films overall when it comes to movie adaptations of comic books and/or graphic novels. Yet X-Men: The Last Stand isn’t a total disaster. It doesn’t live up to its potential, but there are moments here and there where everything gels and the film shows a glimpse of what might have been if the characters had been treated with as much importance as creating killer special effects.

Grade: B-/C+

X-Men: The Last Stand is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action violence, some sexual content and language.