Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

Stars (Out of 10): 7

One Word Summary: Shallow

Movie Details: MPAA RATING: PG-13 Starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer, and Rebecca Romijn GENRE(S): Action  |  Fantasy  |  Sci-fi  |  Suspense/Thriller   WRITTEN BY: Zak Penn Simon Kinberg   DIRECTED BY: Brett Ratner   RELEASE DATE: Theatrical: May 26, 2006  RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes   Relevant Sites: IMDB Official Movie Website Watch The Movie Trailers Shopping: Shop Amazon for items related to this movie. Shop for movie posters at AllPosters

"X-Men: The Last Stand" Review:

          To someone who doesn't see themselves as ill, offer of a cure usually comes as quite insulting. In the world of X-Men: The Last Stand (X-Men 3), it is exactly this, the offer of a cure to mutancy that sends mutant vs. mutant, mutant vs. man, and man vs. mutant.

Dr. Charles Xavier isn't offended by the option. If a mutant thinks he needs to be cured, so be it, but it is better to teach that no cure is needed than to fight back against it unnecessarily. Things are getting better for mutants. There is now a Department of Mutant Affairs within the government, and it's even headed by a mutant (Dr. Hank McCoy, aka Beast). Magneto on the other hand believes the cure to be the beginning of a war to exterminate mutants by the government.

X-Men 3's problem can be summed up with extreme simplicity:

X2's runtime: 134 minutes

X3's runtime: 103 minutes

          X3 isn't a bad movie—not in the least. It's a short movie, and because it's so short, there's only so good it can be. Whereas the first two X-Men movies brought us almost intimately close to at least a few characters, in X3 we only see them from afar. Characters are light and superficial. We meet Leech, the source of the 'cure,” and we see his emotions but not enough to really understand them. We meet Angel, but aside from a few random appearances, his role is irrelevant. We see Jean Grey's return, but there's no refresher course on the love triangle between her, Scott, and Logan for new viewers.

          X3 is clearly a movie where, for whatever reason, the script was stripped of a lot of its deepness. Though it's a movie about mutants, X-Men has dealt with, historically, real human drama, and that's what has set it aside from less successful comic book franchises.

Director Brett Ratner (Brian Singer directed the first two films) chose to make a different kind of movie. It's 30 minutes shorter and packed with more crowd-pleasing action and less of everything else. One scene even features a fake battle scene which, quite obviously, provides nothing for the story other than the excuse for a few more explosions.

Still, as I said, X3 is not a bad movie. Though the film is short, what is there is tremendous. Except for the fact that it's fictionalized, this movie isn't that much different or less powerful than many movies that deal with ethnic cleansing directly. The theme is there and the message is the same. Many of the film's topics—especially Rogue's personal struggle with her powers—are extremely interesting, and it's the lack of depth in these areas that is so unfortunate.

The Bottom Line is that X-Men: The Last Stand is just like a Lean Cuisine dinner; it might suffice as is, but gosh, if they just packed it with a few more calories, it would be delicious.