Movie Maven

X-Men: The Last Stand
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, Ian McKellan
Written by: Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn
Directed by: Brett Ratner
Official Website

Photo courtesy of: Slide 2

In the hectic atmosphere that is Movie Maven's existence, I didn't get a chance to wish you a Happy Summer Movie Season!! All semblance of budgeting my money and time at the theaters has gone out the window with the prospect of air conditioning and watching some seriously cool shit blow up. While I suppose my unofficial entre into Summer '06 came with The Da Vinci Code, I decided to celebrate the vacation from school and Oscar films with X-Men 3.

The first two installments of the series have been my favorite comic book movies to date. Bryan Singer, who directed X-Men 1 and 2 really tapped into the universal themes established in the comics, and the link to issues today: racism and government control, the ambiguousness of evil, etc. It was less about the plot and more about introducing whole, real people into a fictional crisis on the world stage. Singer had a poetry and rhythm in his work, a beauty and darkness that stayed with you long after you saw the movie. The special effects were impressive not just because of their noise and flash, but also their ingenuity (one part I always have in my mind is when Magneto (Ian McKellan,) who can manipulate metals, sucked all the iron out of a guard's bloodstream and used the iron as a method of escape from his prison in X-Men 2.) The X-Men flicks were always big, loud movies, but there was a method to it. I always had a sense that Singer and his crew handled the story and characters with care and affection.

I didn't get that sense with the third, this one directed by Brett Ratner. The story centers around a "cure" to mutant power that's been developed and is now available to the anyone who wishes it. Some think it's awesome, some think it's an attempt at mutant genocide. And then the fun begins. If in adept hands, this would be a terrific jumping-off point for serious discussion, but Ratner apparently is no Singer. Ratner doesn't handle the story so much as inflate it, stuffing it full of sub-plots, exploding cars and tons of extraneous mutants until it heaves and begs for Pepto Bismol. He doesn't love and develop his characters so much as introduce them and then leave them hanging off the proverbial cliff. There's just too much stuff. For example, he introduces Angel (the delectable Ben Foster,) a boy with wings. One of the truly memorable scenes in the film is in the beginning where a 10-year-old Angel is in bathroom of his home, desperately cutting off his own wings with a saw, a look of pure terror in his eyes. After this one would think Angel would be featured. Perhaps have some sort of extended dialogue with other characters. Some development of who he is as a man. But no, the poor lad is relegated to jumping out of a building, his CGI wings flapping behind him, and, in one scene, saving his mutant-phobic father from death as his lab is destroyed. That's all she wrote. So a truly impressive beginning dwindles and melts away in the face of blowing up some seriously cool shit.

Now if this was just benign summer fun, I would not gripe so much. But as an X-Men fan, Ratner and screenwriters Kinberg and Penn did something completely unforgivable in my eyes.

They made Phoenix into a sub-plot.

Phoenix, for those who are not as dorky as I am, is a pure, undiluted manifestation of the powers of the telekinetic Jean Grey (Famke Janssen.) She's not evil, per se, but is pure emotional and supernatural energy, rendering her unstable and incapable of reason. For many comic book aficionados, this plot-line borders on scripture- it's the grand-daddy of X-Men literature.

The problem with it in this movie is not that they oversimplified it (though they did) or completely changed the way in which she operated (though they did that too) but that they didn't consider it worthy for a main plot. She comes back, she looks evil and kills a lot of people, including several main characters. The end. Her coming is wrapped up in the war between mutant and "homo-sapiens" (as Magneto derisively calls them,) and in the end the movie is about the war and not Phoenix. While I admire the directorial bravery in having her kill off the people she did, there was simply not enough of her story to make any kind of coherent sense. Plus it's just disrespectful.

I would still call X-Men worth a viewing, though I think a rental from Blockbuster would suffice in lieu of spending your ten dollars on Surround Sound and cup-holders. It was a disappointing end to a rather wonderful series, but Hugh Jackman is still bad-ass, Patrick Stewart is still dignified and smart, and Ian McKellan still has gravitas to spare. The director may have sucked the life out of the plot, but these three still manage to emerge from the bloated film intact.

Plus some really cool shit blows up.