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Review: X-men, The Last Stand

Posted by Mark | Filed under Movies, Reviews

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rat­ing: 2.75 out of 5.

Yes­ter­day, the wife and I headed out to watch a mati­nee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was plan­ning on writ­ing up a review of it for MovieCom­ment¹. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he’d already writ­ten his own review. And not sur­pris­ingly², we have com­pletely dif­fer­ent opin­ions on both the cur­rent X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Rat­ner was selected as the direc­tor for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy work­ing on Super­man Returns. Unfor­tu­nately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the char­ac­ter devel­op­ment which made the movies inter­est­ing. Mr. Rat­ner even went so far as to make the bat­tles flow as much like a comic book bat­tle as he could. This was a hor­ri­ble mis­take as the dif­fer­ences in the two medi­ums do not allow the flow of a comic book bat­tle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audi­ence accepts that the artist can­not draw every detail of a bat­tle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imag­i­na­tion. With movies, we have a long his­tory of war movies which show that the film­maker can show sig­nif­i­cantly more detail. So when we have mul­ti­ple scenes in the mid­dle of bat­tles where noth­ing is hap­pen­ing; it’s just bor­ing (e.g. dozens of mutants sup­pos­edly leap­ing to the attack and all we get is them leap­ing over the rubble).

Addi­tion­ally, I have to take issue with MovieComment’s claim that Storm looks espe­cially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* fly­ing *quote* scenes are with­out argu­ment the worst spe­cial effects in the movie. I haven’t seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stu­pid swing­ing around on that rope. Then there’s the whole “wheee! I can spin!” crap they came up with for Storm. For cry­ing out loud, this char­ac­ter is the­o­ret­i­cally sup­posed to be the human mutant equiv­a­lent of Mother Nature and they’ve got her spin­ning around like a f’ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren’t too bad. Pretty much, any of them focus­ing on Wolver­ine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shad­ow­cat) and the Jug­ger­naut was really good (the end of that sequence was par­tic­u­larly funny).

The addi­tion of other char­ac­ters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shad­ow­cat and Colos­sus³. Bad in that they did not really do any­thing with their char­ac­ters and they failed to con­tinue devel­op­ing some of the other char­ac­ters from the pre­vi­ous movies. Most notably, Rogue’s sto­ry­line was pretty much dropped and con­verted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn’t play well on the screen.

Speak­ing of bits which didn’t play well on the screen, the cli­max of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolver­ine blew seri­ous chunks. To any­body who liked this scene, I apol­o­gize but Famke Janssen’s per­for­mance just did not pull off the seri­ous­ness of the moment. Maybe with a bet­ter direc­tor she could have done it, but I guess we’ll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director’s cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very inter­est­ing. Over­all, I’m glad I went to see the film (for the new char­ac­ters) but I’m extremely glad we went to main­tee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seri­ously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you’re read­ing this review prior to watch­ing the movie; stay in your seat until after the cred­its. There’s one more scene after the cred­its are over which you don’t want to miss.

¹ A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
² He has con­sis­tently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the fun­ni­est he’s ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhor­rent piece of utter excre­ment.
³ My par­tic­u­lar favorites.

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