X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) **/*****

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I was apprehensive going into the third film in the X-Men franchise. I’d heard all of the pre-release horror stories; Bryan Singer, the director and main visionary of the first two films leaving, the director of Rush Hour being his last minute replacement, the studio rushing the project in order to beat Superman Returns into theatres, etc. Suffice to say, I was pretty sure that sitting through this movie was going to give me the shakes. The good news is, all things considered, it actually didn’t turn out to be a complete turd. Just mostly.

From my perspective, it seems like the X-Men franchise has been more a tale of what studio influence does to a film than anything else. When watching the first film, you can see that the basic vision is there; the filmmakers knew what they were shooting for, but because the second coming of comic movies hadn’t started yet there was a studio executive and accountant looking over their shoulders shaking their heads no every second. Once the first film did well critically and financially, the restraints seemed to be off for the second film. With X2, Singer had the money and freedom to do what he wanted, and that potential you saw in the first movie was realized. Which brings us to X-Men: The Last Stand. No Bryan Singer = studio takes full control of production = we’re back to square one. I think perhaps the best way to see this is by looking at the runtimes of these three films. The first film comes in at a tight 104 minutes, the second film, where Singer had the studio off his back, came in at a beefier 133 minutes, and now this third Singerless film clocks in a runtime of, you guessed it, 104 minutes.

Now, if you ask me, as a blockbuster film series such as this builds, the stories should be getting more and more epic. Each installment should be bigger, flashier, longer, and have more character depth than the last. Of course this is looking at things from a storytelling perspective, and not a marketing perspective. What X-Men: The Last Stand needed more than anything was room to breathe. An epic story dealing with this many characters is just too much to cram into a measly 104 minutes. Because of this, pretty much every character gets shorted on screen time, and it ends up feeling like you’ve got the Cliff Notes version of the movie. However, I’m sure some studio executive somewhere was worried about short attention span audiences getting shifty in their seats, or about cramming in as many showings as possible everyday in order to maximize profits. In this movie it’s very rare that a character gets to say anything that isn’t directly related to the forward momentum of the plot. We’re constantly jumping off to the next scene so quickly that we’re never allowed to enjoy what we’re seeing. Consequently, nothing that happens in this movie packs much emotional punch, and the characters turn into homogenized narrators rather than the richly defined individuals you should be able to have by the time you reach the third film in a series.

So, what’s good in this? Most of the action is well done and fun. There was only a couple of the cringe worthy moments you come to expect from comic movies. Ian McKellen continues to rule as Magneto, despite having less to work with. Big, consequential things happen plot wise. Kelsey Grammer was the perfect choice to play The Beast, and his makeup wasn’t that bad, though it probably could have been better and he could have used more to do. They got a cute, young actress in Ellen Page to play every thirteen year old boy’s crush Kitty Pryde. Plus, there are super powered mutants beating the crap out of each other.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, its time to get into what was bad. It’s not that I want to sound like I’m completely panning this film, but the fact is that the stuff that was good wasn’t really all that good, and the stuff that was bad just points to how good the film could have been. Firstly, there were a few things in the movie that did make me shudder and cringe a little. The first was the clunky dialogue that happens throughout. It’s not that the script is horrible, it’s just a little clunky and lame; this probably would have been smoothed out by a Bryan Singer rewrite of the studio script. Secondly, there is an action scene early on that made me think this whole film was going to be a bucket of crap. It involves Wolverine fighting a giant robot. Sounds cool, huh? Well, it probably should have been, if not for the fact that the rushed filmmakers didn’t have the time to put together a sequence where Wolverine fights a giant robot, so instead we get some floodlights obscured by smoke and darkness, Wolverine disappearing into said smoke and darkness, some metal on metal sound effects, and then a lame looking robot head falling out of the shadows. This probably could have been fixed if the filmmakers had more time to put together visual effects instead of having to haphazardly cobble something together in order to beat Bryan Singer’s new superhero project into the theatres. Thirdly, John Powell’s score was overblown, clichéd, and annoying throughout. At times it felt like I was watching the ending “lets have a talk” scene in Full House, and others it felt like I was watching Van Damme’s masterpiece Street Fighter movie. This probably could have been avoided if Bryan Singer had directed and his normal collaborator John Ottman could have classed up the music like he did for the second X-Men movie. In conclusion, what this film needed was some sort of filmmaker with a vision, like a Bryan Singer, fighting for it, trying to make it better than the studio wanted it to be. Someone to say, “Hey, Storm shouldn’t be awkwardly pushed to the front of the movie just because Halle Berry is a whiny (terribly miscast) diva!” Someone to say, “Hey, this love triangle that we tacked on with the teens never really goes anywhere or gets resolved! Maybe we can flesh it out a bit, or use the screen time for something else!” Someone to say, I don’t care when you want to release this, we’re going to need another six months in production to do it well!” But alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

So, now that I’ve gotten all that pesky film review stuff done with, its time for me to rant a little. The biggest disappointment in the film, for me, comes with the inclusion of the Phoenix storyline. For those not in the know, the Phoenix Saga is pretty much the holy grail of comic book storylines. This thing, as it was printed, was pretty damn epic. It had everything; drama, tragedy, action, subtext, romance, space opera. Now, I’m not saying that this movie should have translated the Phoenix Saga directly like it was in print, as that would have been stupid and impossible, but they could have at least tried to get some of the struggle, emotion, and drama of the original storyline. Here, instead of teetering between the brink of good and evil, the pain of constant control and the release of giving in, Jean Grey is pretty much introduced into the film as an evil zombie version of her character from the first two films, and she pretty much stays that way until the end. One of the main problems lies in the fact that Cyclops is given so little screen time in this. Jean Grey goes evil, and her life long love isn’t around to have anything to do with it? What in the Holy Hell is that all about? Now, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise as I hated James Marsden as Cyclops and I don’t think he would have been up to the challenges of performing this storyline properly; but that’s an issue with the casting of the first film and not the story that this one tells. Jean Grey, in this film, should have been teetering on the brink of control and insanity. She should have been split, being jerked back and forth by the ideologies and manipulations of Magneto and Xavier. Cyclops should have been freaking out, because his newly resurrected girlfriend, now struggling with animal urges, limitless power, and control issues suddenly has much more in common with Wolverine than she does with him, and he might be losing her all over again. Wolverine should have been wracked with conflict, because now that he is closer to Jean than ever, he realizes that she’s losing herself in the process. The struggle that Jean goes through, the choices that she makes, should have become an isolated symbol of the struggle between Magneto, Xavier, and the homo-sapiens; and her eventual loss of control and its consequences should have been hard hitting and tragic. Instead we get evil zombie Jean Grey who never even really talks and just looks menacing. That extra half an hour of screen time that the second movie got might have been used to make some of this stuff happen. And for the love of all the Geek Gods in heaven, we never get to see the flame bird power signature in all its glory! Never once! Not even a spark! What the heck? Who is responsible for that?