deeplyshallow // x-men: the last stand

x-men: the last stand

It took a while for the X-Men franchise to really start cooking for me. I saw the first movie two or three times, and while I appreciated it from a picky movie geek’s point of view, I don’t recall loving it. The first sequel, however, was a knockout punch, in my opinion. In particular, the increased focus on developing the Jean Grey character really paid off, and set up the franchise for a killer third movie.

Exit Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. As the most visible behind-the-camera talent abandoned the X-Men franchise for the impossible-to-pass-up opportunity to resurrect Superman, most of the hopes I’d held in reserve for X-Men III went with them.

And with very good reason. Because X-Men: The Last Stand truly sucks balls.

I avoided seeing this movie for quite a while, and caught it just before it left the local theatres. From the beginning it’s a mess. The opening titles have a much different feel from the previous two movies, taking a noticeably more comic-book approach and signifying, intentionally or not, that the new crew takes the movie much less seriously. The first few scenes are set up with title cards like “Twenty years ago” and “Ten years ago” and “The not-too-distant future”, a technique I’ve never been much for. It’s hard to be let down when your expectations are already so low, so I wasn’t too disappointed to discover that all three of these scenes blow. Without giving any plot details away, let me run them down:

Twenty years ago: Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), younger and still good friends, visit the home of a promising young mutant for the purposes of enrolling the child in Xavier’s school. The scene isn’t bad, not really; what ruins it is the usage of digital manipulation to make Stewart and McKellen appear to be twenty years younger than they actually are. The effects are about as convincing as an overused Photoshop blur tool. The whole scene comes apart when extreme closeups are used.
Ten years ago: Crazy mutant kid locks himself in the bathroom and tries to hack away his mutated parts while Daddy pounds on the door, demanding to be let it. The originality here is breathtaking. “Let me in!” “Just a minute!” “Let me in!” “Just a minute!” “Let me in!” “Just a minute!”
The not-too-distant future: Here’s where the biggest problem with the movie really kicks off. We’re watching a battle sequence — all of the good X-men versus… well, who the hell knows? It’s pretty foggy. Joining our familiar heroes Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Storm (Halle Berry) are some of the students introduced in the previous movie (e.g. Iceman) and a bunch of new mutants. The new mutants are the problem. They’re such thinly-drawn characters that the only way we can identify them later in the movie is by their mutant power, which is so rarely on display that it’s easy to feel like you’re looking at somebody new every time one of them enters a scene. The movie is clogged with weak new characters who seem to have been written in simply to please the fanboys.

I won’t bother getting into the details of the plot except to say that it’s stupid. Mankind has developed a cure for the mutant gene, and mutants try to destroy it. Enter lots of metaphor for prejudice, outcastism, following your heart, etc. Except in this movie nobody’s presented as weak enough for us to buy into the metaphor; all of the requisite self-doubt scenes are easily solved with platitudes — “They can’t ‘cure’ us because there’s nothing wrong with us!” — so all of these attempts to paint the mutants (who look cooler and more badass than ever) as societal rejects just end up falling flat.

The cure leads to some political manhandling, and let’s be honest: politics has never been the strong point of this franchise. But with the Cookie Monster-esque Beast (Kelsey Grammer) on the scene, new lows have been reached. At least the President in this movie learns from his mistakes.

Like I mentioned before, one of the things I loved most about the second X-Men film was the attention paid to Jean Grey. She was always the most interesting character to me: she seemed to have immense power, yet had a particularly difficult time controlling it. In the second movie, Jean Grey sacrifices herself for the good of her fellow X-men, and a major redemption is hinted at in the movie’s last scene. Now, I’ll admit a certain ignorance of the comic books; maybe what the writers did to Jean Grey in X-Men III follows the comics perfectly. But for me and the rest of the non-comic-readers in the audience, X-Men III’s treatment of Jean Grey is unconscionable: it takes the proud rebirth that was established in X-Men II and jettisons it, and draws Jean Grey as uninterestingly as possible. In the end, it’s difficult to describe her as anything more than a half-comatose serial killer. It’s a ridiculous finish for the most fascinating character of the trilogy.

Let’s talk about the director. Singer left the project to do Superman Returns, except that isn’t really true; he opted to do Superman first, and planned to do X-Men III afterwards. The studio pushed forward without him, hiring Matthew Vaughn instead. Vaughn left after nine weeks because he missed his family (or so the reports say; if that’s true, then Matthew Vaughn’s a dumbass) so the studio hired Brett Ratner instead. Ratner’s an inspired choice: you’d be hard-pressed to find another director with so many popular films (Rush Hour and its sequel, Red Dragon) under his belt who has somehow managed to leave no lasting mark on his own work. Even Michael Bay’s movies are easily identifiable as Michael Bay movies.

The movie’s most glaring problem, however, is its final scene. This should have been the final film in the X-Men universe (unfortunately, a side project entitled Magneto has been announced). Instead, Ratner throws all of the rules out of the window — namely that the mutant cure seems to be irreversible — in order to leave an opening for yet another sequel. Since this movie grossed well over $200M in the U.S. alone, you can bet we’ll be seeing one before the decade’s out. That is, maybe you’ll be seeing one. I think I’ll stay home.