X-Men 3: Last Stand review

2006.06.13 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

The X-Men franchise comes to an end (for now, anyway) with Last Stand, the heartwarming tale of political upheaval among mutant and humankind when a pharmaceutical company invents a means of suppressing the mutant X gene. Also, there is some fighting and whatnot.

Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, Rebecca Romijn, and others return to wield their powers in the final confrontation. They all do fine jobs, with McKellen and Stewart picking up any slack that's lying around. Romijn again does a particularly good job of looking and sounding menacing in what amounts to blue paint and a bikini; this should not be discounted.

The X-Men have always been a lot more political than most comic book superheroes. But in my memory, that was always a sidebar subplot to the real conflict: hot mutant-on-mutant action. This movie finally provides that, altho there's still a bit of the mutant-on-cop action that dulled the otherwise sterling edge of the first two films. The problem with this movie—not that there is much of one—is that it tries to do too much.

Besides the new storyline, there is a lot of story to wrap up from the first two films, and this film doesn't even try to address some of it. Wolverine's back story was covered well enough in the second film that it's dropped here; Nightcrawler's Catholic guilt is forgotten (actually, Nightcrawler is forgotten). And a couple of other characters are dealt with in such perfunctory ways that it's appalling (so long, Cyclops; we hardly knew ye).

What does this make room for? Well, there's return of Jean Grey (how can we miss you if you won't go away?), the introduction of Angel, Beast, and Juggernaut, and a love triangle between Rogue, Iceman, and Kitty Pride. You remember Kitty Pride as the cute girl who ran thru Professor Xavier's office door in the second movie. Well, for some reason she's been promoted to Junior X-Man. She does okay; but we really learn nothing about her other than that she likes to ice skate.

We learn even less about anyone else, however. The feelings and motivations of virtually everyone are entirely opaque even tho they still do a lot more talking than clobbering.

Director Brett Ratner takes over from Bryan Singer, much to fan outcry. I'm not sure why. Singer's The Usual Suspects didn't really thrill me, and Ratner—director of the Rush Hour movies—at least had some pulse-quickening action movies in his credits. He also did Red Dragon and The Family Man, which I enjoyed enough to give me hope that, with the right script, he would do fine.

And I think he has. The material he has to work with seems good, but Ratner rushes it (no surprise there, I suppose). It's co-written by Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg, who are not nicknamed "The Two Geniuses." Penn worked on X2 but also Elektra and Inspector Gadget, the kind of films that should get people blackballed. Kinberg at least wrote Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which had wit, but he gets points deducted for the tumble he took with XXX: State of the Union. Still, they output a decent script that probably got cut a little too tightly.

Strangely, given the mysterious promise at the end of X2, Famke Janssen's character of Jean Grey is virtual dead weight. She shows up with the bad guys but sits out the final confrontation so she can have the limelight for herself afterwards, apparently.

Several characters are disposed of, altho none of them leave corpses, so anything is possible. It is, after all, a comic book. But the events are pretty effective as portrayed and most of the characters get their moment in the sun. There's a particularly good sequence in which Juggernaut pursues Kitty Pride thru several walls, smashing them with brute force while she slips thru them like a ghost.

In all, it's an entertaining action movie with more heart and tension than most. And in the end, that's what I go to the movies for.

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