Overall Rating
  Awesome: 5.21%
Worth A Look: 29.86%
Just Average: 28.44%
Pretty Crappy: 18.96%
Sucks: 17.54%
13 reviews, 133 user ratings
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| X-Men: The Last Stand |
by Jay Seaver
"Better than it needs to be, though not as good as one might like."
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Considering the continued popularity of the series, I doubt that "X-Men: The Last Stand" really represents the last of anything, especially considering the rich library of characters filmmakers can choose from should they choose to jettison more expensive pieces. And give them credit for recognizing this - the third X-Men movie certainly plays like they could either walk away or at least play a very different team in #4.Characters don't necessarily have to die, though. A San Francisco pharmaceutical company has just announced the development of a drug that permanently suppresses expression of the mutant "X-gene" - a cure, so to speak. Mutant terrorist Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his Brotherhood of Mutants consider this an abomination; telepathic Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) doesn't like the idea, but recalls having to place mental blocks in a student to prevent her own powers from going out of control. That former student, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) was presumed dead at the end of the last movie, but she's back, and her hold on sanity is slipping just as Xavier feared.
The X-Men comic universe has, in roughly forty years of publication, amassed hundreds of characters, every one of them someone's favorite. The Last Stand teeters on the brink of overload, and maybe succumbs - many of Magneto's new recruits are notable only for what powers they bring to the table, and the younger X-Men get little more in the way of development. The returning characters do a little better, though it could have gotten really crowded if they'd kept Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler around or the core characters from the first film (Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, James Marsden's Cyclops, Janssen's Jean Grey, Halle Berry's Storm, and Anna Paquin's Rogue) were all in play from start to finish. In general, though, the cast does very well with what they're given. Particularly noteworthy new additions are Kelsey Grammar as U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs Henry "Beast" McCoy - his voice has the right combination of gravity and potential whimsy to make the character expressive through heavy make-up - and Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde, the girl who can walk through walls briefly glimpsed in earlier entries. She gives the impression that she really thought this was just a school she was attending, and the superhero thing is really not entirely welcome. Plus, there's Vinnie Jones as the Juggernaut. Juggernaut's an outsize thug, and that is right up Jones's alley.
One of the thing about the X-Men that makes it works so well as movies is the way the cast is set up, especially the returning cast. The conflict of these films is between Magneto and Xavier, with their respective teams doing much of the battle. So you've got two outstanding actors with experience adding weight to their words and ideologies, and powers that can be exercised without too much exertion to anchor the movie, but we don't have to watch them get in a fist-fight for the climax. That's the job of younger people who may not quite be in Stewart's and McKellen's leagues, but are good enough. Hugh Jackman has Wolverine down to a schtick that works, while Shawn Ashmore and Aaron Stanford have built up a good rivalry as "Iceman" and "Pyro". Rebecca Romijn is cocky maliciousness as the shape-changing Mystique, and her reaction when she sees what her loyalty to Magneto is worth is delicious. Halle Berry still seems a little lightweight as Storm, but as the movie starts she's shouldering more of the burden of leadership than she's used to, so it works.
The biggest negative is what the script does with Janssen: Very little. She should be the emotional heart of this movie, and a character with a split personality should be a meaty role, but it winds up just being a way for her character to be a plot device that does whatever the script needs it to do at the moment. That's a disappointment, not just because Janssen is a favorite of mine and using an established character like that is lazy; but because the X-Men movies and comics have always set themselves apart by what the larger-than-life characters and stories represent, and a film that carries that tradition on should be able to transfer some of those smarts to its characterization.
The movie is kind of clever, though - while the X-Men have always been a metaphor for the civil rights movement, it's too often been the civil right movement of the 1960s and not today. The Last Stand updates that a little; with a mutant in the cabinet and a mostly sympathetic president in office, the challenge is less about dealing with Klan-equivalents looking to exterminate you than the question of assimilation versus maintaining a cultural identity. And while we're all concentrating on a relatively non-controversial stand on racism, the filmmakers certainly seem to be talking about abortion - if scenes of young mutants going to receive their cure while protesters scream at them from across the street and one extremist throws a fireball doesn't seem familiar... Well, they you're probably just there for the action.
And no reason not to be - the action delivers. There was a fair amount of hand-wringing about Brett Ratner getting the job of director after Bryan Singer (who directed the first two) left the project, and while he's not as strong on the interpersonal drama as Singer was, he's more than competent when it comes to staging a big fight scene. The X-Men franchise is relatively unique in that it gives the filmmakers license to throw a whole bunch of superheroes and supervillains with different powers up against each other without worrying about worrying how Superman and Batman co-exist or diluting the story of how you get any of these more-than human people. There are two or three big set pieces, and you know pretty early on that Singer and his writers (Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn) aren't worried about leaving things in place for whoever winds up doing X-Men 4 - folks die, lose their powers, and switch sides. The sequences are well-edited with a genuine sense of menace, but also fun - if a ninety-pound girl gaining the upper hand on a two-ton bruiser as they each run through walls in their own way doesn't put a smile on your face, you're in the wrong movie.In an ideal world, there'd probably be a little more to the characters in this movie. But I'm forgiving; it's got lots of superheroes fighting supervillains, and at least has one or two ideas in its head to go with the action.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=14574&reviewer=371
originally posted: 06/13/06 21:35:12
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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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