I have never read any of the comics, so I was only able to try to make sense of the latest X-Men film, X-Men: The Last Stand using the information I had from the previous X-Men films, X-Men and X2. I thought that the first film was ok, and it could have been better had it not stumbled in the final parts, nor suffered from some cheap special effects (probably due to budget). Nevertheless, I did not expect to see some of these same problems two films later, and with newer difficulties.
The first film had as strength the position of being the introductory film, and so there were many possibilities in developing some of the characters that we see. Most notably, Logan’s (Hugh Jackman) story was extremely interesting, and this was strongly followed through in the second film, X2. The second film had brought the level of this series very high, but despite this X-Men: The Last Stand sadly does not stand up to either of its predecessors. It has some few bold moments, but overall I didn’t find myself caring very much about what was going on, and the presence of so many characters and so many changes happening so quickly had a numbing effect on me.
There are three main storylines from what I could tell: the first is that some pharmaceutical company has developed a cure for mutants, to render them into normal humans without special powers; the second is that Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) returns from the dead as perhaps the most powerful mutant on the planet, but has a psychological disorder; the third is that Magneto still wants to kill regular humans, and his cause is strengthened because the humans have come up with yet another plan against mutants. Besides Jean Grey’s resurrection, the other two storylines are more or less copied from the second film.
The movie will show us all of our favorite mutant friends that we expect to see (except for Nightcrawler), and perhaps triples the amount of mutants with special powers. This is the film’s first drawback: too many mutants are shown with little or no development for the majority of them, including the main characters from the previous films. When I was watching the film, this was mostly confusing but now I see it as having been a mistake. Mostly, the special powers of different mutants did not look very good, and most of the computer animation that was used looked like shiny jelly. With some exceptions, most of the special effects used during the film do not look very impressive, with simple camera set-ups and obvious practical effects. Every scene where someone is shown flying or floating in the air is quite distracting.
Even most of the action scenes were poorly done, with a couple of exceptions. The nicest scenes were with Magneto on the Golden Gate Bridge and the end of the climactic battle. Otherwise, camera shaking is heavily used during action scenes, and while this does not normally disturb me, it didn’t seem to work very well for Last Stand.
The actors mostly do a nice job with their characters, but the script for this film is horrible. I realize that I was watching an action film, and that the most important aspect is not necessarily introspection or layered character analyses, but there are limits! All of the dialogue in this film is largely composed of strings of clichéd sentences, and if we as viewers are supposed to accept such poor writing in an action film, then the dialogue must not become obtrusive.
For example, if one were compelled to make a film which contains only clichéd dialogue, then my suggestion would be to remove, or rewrite the moments when a character is giving a speech during what is supposed to be an emotional event. Storm (Halle Berry) gives one of these speeches, and though Ms. Berry performed poorly in this film, for that one scene I would place the blame on the writers.
Halle Berry was terrible, but for some reason her character, Storm, was given a larger role in this film. Most of the time, she maintains the same facial expression, and part of her special powers is the ability to spin really quickly, which I thought looked quite silly. She did not bring any weight to her character and looked mostly like a princess, even having a new hairstyle, as is noted early during the film. For some reason, the film tries to convince us that Storm’s “nemesis” is the only other black person in the film, and so she has two fight scenes that are completely unnecessary to anything having to do with the story.
Although the movie is a mess, it does manage to have a reasonable and satisfying ending, and I advise those who choose to watch it to stay until after the credits have finished for a special surprise. I am sure some people can still enjoy the film, but I do not generally advise it to fans of the previous two X-Men movies.
The other Flixens asked me to review X-Men: The Last Stand because I am not familiar with the comics, or with the controversy that apparently surrounded the film’s production. And so, I have left director Brett Ratner free of criticism, since it seems that he was thrust into this film in the middle of its early development. I could tell that a noble effort was made with this film, as the combination of various elements is always an ambitious task, and though it mostly doesn’t work in this case, it could have still been worse. I saw many interesting components in X-Men: The Last Stand, and had more care and time been invested into refining the film, it could have potentially been an impressive conclusion to the series. Sadly, the parts were not well put together, and as a result X-Men: The Last Stand falls to pieces.
(out of a maximum of 5)
I have kept the review as free of spoilers as possible. Please feel free to post in the comments section below if you have spoiler-related questions.
