X-Men: The Last Stand

X-Men: The Last Stand is an ensemble action film that achieves a delicate balance of its various forces and delivers a reasonably structured and fast-paced summer action film. Brett Ratner has carried on the X-Men battle between the good mutants and the not-so-good mutants and the humans. This time the lines are firmly drawn and the mutants openly face each other as Magneto takes his mutants in all out war against humans and only Wolverine and a handful of altruistic mutants stand in his way. This is exactly the sort of fare that summer moviegoers expect. There are colorful characters and astonishing special effects and though the plot may leave some scratching their heads it doesn’t get in the way of the action.

Not as well crafted or as much fun as X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand still delivers an action packed adventure though the title may be misleading since it seems unlikely to be the last of the franchise. As with many action film sequels X-Men III suffers from a ballooning cast and this means that even if the franchise stalls there are still ample opportunities for spin-offs. With each subsequent film more and more characters are added to the mix diluting the acting by each individual cast member. X-Men does an admirable job weeding out the heroes leaving only a small band of overmatched superheroes. But it more than makes up for this by creating an army of super villains who are not well defined and who somewhat blend together into a mash of poorly dressed super trash.

It seems that there is more plot exposition missing from this film than from the previous two editions. Perhaps the film tries to follow too many threads. First there is the cure, a political (as opposed to militaristic in the second film) solution to the mutant ‘problem’. The government provides a cure for anyone who wants to live like a normal human being. Of course without long term tests who knows how effective it is, but that is what sequels are for. The slippery slope is when the cure is used as a weapon against unruly mutants and the mutant community gets up in arms. Treated correctly this could have been more than enough motivation for the film and its central characters. Do the mutants use their powers to fight for their very survival against humans out to destroy them? See it sounds like it could have some meat to it.

But X-Men III goes for more than that. They bring back Jean Grey this time as Dark Phoenix in a rather unsatisfying alternate story line. The audience gets the feeling that this story about the incredibly powerful and unstable Jean is going to go somewhere tying up the characters and the loose story lines but instead the thread pops up and disappears throughout the film and leads to a rather distracting and anti-climactic ending. Plus it leads to a mutant ability classification system that is bandied around by a number of characters but never fully explained. What is a category 5 mutant anyway? Who invented the classification system? Did the classification only go up to 4 until Jean came along?

The best thing about X-Men III is that they finally give Academy Award winner Halle Berry something to do. With many of the other lead good guys out of the way Berry’s Storm finally gets to step up into the leadership role that she deserves and she get considerably more screen time because of it. Unfortunately most of the other characters suffer from a lack of cohesive screen time as a result. Most notably the new Archangel who is cinematically striking but who appears and disappears without obvious rhyme or reason and has barely a half a dozen lines. The same can be said for the mysterious ‘cure’ mutant who seems to be the key to the plot but then doesn’t really do anything impressive.

Kelsey Grammer seems to get the rest of the screen time that isn’t occupied by Berry’s Storm or Jackman’s Wolverine. Grammer adds restraint and ponderance to the mutant cause as the blue Beast, Dr. Hank McCoy, a mutant who works within the government to insure the rights of mutants. He adds both the sense and the sense of humor that the film seems to lack at times. But the rest of the new additions don’t get much screen time to strut their stuff. Even those that do show up for a while don’t get very many lines in this action film so it is difficult to get a sense of their characters beyond their most visible mutant abilities. In the second film Ice-Man had a personality and some interesting dialogue, here he is a one trick visual effect. Even Patrick Stewart’s Dr. Xavier is left without much to do.

Though not as good as the previous two x-Men, X-Men: The Last Stand is an enjoyable summer comic book blockbuster that should entertain for an afternoon. The characters are earnest in their endeavor to save humanity, or destroy it, though most of humanity seems more interested in staying out of the way while the mutants destroy each other. This film invests a fair amount of time in a secondary storyline with potential that just doesn’t go anywhere and it is this that bogs down the film and slows what could have been a perfectly enjoyable mind-numbing summer film. Despite that the film is a lot of fun and the characters are still as memorable as they were for the first X-Men film. Just don’t expect to have a sensible conversation about the finer points of the plot afterwards.