Overall Rating
  Awesome: 5.61%
Worth A Look: 29.91%
Average: 28.04%
Pretty Bad: 19.16%
Total Crap: 17.29%
13 reviews, 136 user ratings
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| X-Men: The Last Stand |
by Rob Gonsalves
"What's the cure for studio mediocrity? Not this movie, that's for sure."
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If "X-Men" were a TV series, "X-Men: The Last Stand" would be a hectic season finale. Unfortunately, there haven't been 21 hours of set-up before this finale, and a lot of fans and non-fans alike are going to feel there's a lot missing.This third installment can't even be said to bite off more than it can chew; it gums it and lets it plop lazily onto the plate. The script pays shaky lip service to the comic book's celebrated "Phoenix Saga," though in name only. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is resurrected, and has Dark Powers, and is called Phoenix, but this is very much the multiplex version of Chris Claremont's premise. A medium capable of delivering sustained, complex narratives like Berlin Alexanderplatz should be equal to adapting a comic-book narrative. But there's a reason so many of us breathed a sigh of relief when the adaptation of Watchmen pointed its toes up.
Mainly, this is the Wolverine 'n' Magneto Show, and Hugh Jackman and Ian McKellen continue to bring their characters more gravitas than they deserve (as written). But even McKellen can't do much with the way Magneto vacillates so wildly in tone. Those who enjoyed the teasing father-daughter dynamic between Magneto and the funky Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) in the first two movies will feel as betrayed as Mystique when the old man turns his back on her in her greatest moment of vulnerability.
Magneto is concerned about "The Cure" — not the '80s mope-rock band, but a genetic quick-fix for mutant powers. Professor X (Patrick Stewart) is concerned as well, but as usual he takes the path of scrupulous moderation, aided by human-mutant go-between Hank "Beast" McCoy (Kelsey Grammer). The script gestures feebly towards relevance — some mutants, such as the untouchable Rogue (Anna Paquin), wouldn't mind being normal; others see it as an intolerable capitulation to the demands of the homo sapien herd. But all of this takes a back seat to the usual idiotic kabooms.
Famously, the previous X-director Bryan Singer was busy making us believe a man can fly again, so after a brief game of musical chairs, the keys to the kingdom were handed to non-entity Brett Ratner, who has no temperament or vision of his own but can passably ape the style of his betters. In Red Dragon (with considerable help from original production designer Kristi Zea) Ratner made a prequel that retrofitted comfortably with the look of The Silence of the Lambs, and here he fashions an X-Men movie that looks like the others but lacks the emotional and tactile heft Singer brought to them. It has no passion, no connection to where we are now, and in a series whose stories have heretofore spoken dark truths about American intolerance, that matters.
The rest of the mutants get ridiculously short shrift, most notably the new character Angel, who gets an emo self-cutting moment at the start but then retreats into irrelevance. Too many characters clutter this stew, diluting every possible conflict; indie It Girl of the moment Ellen Page is the third actress in the series to play the phasing Kitty Pryde, not that you'd notice from what she's given to do. (After this and King Kong, let's have a moritorium on poignant ice-rink scenes.) What's far worse, a major character dies offscreen, and though said character isn't really well-loved enough to create much outrage in the audience, the way he's simply blown off is insulting just the same. The movie is just too disconnected to be considered actively bad; it doesn't work hard enough for us to feel passionately about it either way.More than ever, the theatrical release of a movie has come to seem like a formality before its true life on DVD. Nowhere has this seemed more true than in "X-Men: The Last Stand," whose inevitable longer "director's cut" on a 2-disc set may contain things like character development. What it won't contain is much of a reason to care.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14574&reviewer=416
originally posted: 05/27/06 12:25:19
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USA
26-May-2006 (PG-13)
DVD: 03-Oct-2006
UK
26-May-2006
Australia
25-May-2006
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