X-Men 3: The Last Stand

The final movie that Marvel will make using this main group of mutants, The Last Stand is a good but not great movie. I like that its darker than the first two but the level of conflict doesn’t match up, nor are the special effects especially innovative or stunning.

One problem that Bryan Singer, who directed the first two X movies, handled better than Bret Rattner does is integrating the extremely large cast into the movie rather than simply attempting to impress the audience by showing weird mutant powers. A good example is the ice skating scene, having a teenage boy freeze over a fountain to cheer up a girl. This type of scene injects stop energy (as Dave Winer might put it) into the movie, and there are too many of them.

Last Stand is fun and a nice wrap for the Xavier-Magneto conflict arc. But I really blame Rattner and his writers, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, or maybe Singer for jumping ship to do Superman Returns. Which was another disappointment, but that’s for a review I’ll post soon enough.

Frankly, the core of this movie was Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Famke Jansen’s Jean Grey and Halle Berry’s Storm and the movie went all over the place to show as many new mutants as could fit.

recommended