X-Men: The Last Stand

You know, the first 30 minutes or so actually aren't so bad, despite Ratner's obvious downgrade in direction ability and Scott's unneeded death. But sadly, it's all downhill from there. With Ratner as director, everything here is just slightly worse. The writing is worse, the direction is less creative, and the social commentary aspect is even more watered down than before. I actually don't mind that Charles dies, nor do I mind how he dies. It makes sense that the Phoenix would kill him. But what I don't like is that nothing really comes of it other than motivating the X-Men to do something they were going to do anyway. This isn't the only seemingly important moment that ends up not becoming much. Pyro seems like he'll turn on Magneto after seeing what he did to Mystique, but he doesn't. Rogue leaves the story to be cured and nothing really comes of it other than her appearing at the end. It doesn't disrupt the plot or even any character relationships. She just leaves, comes back, and everything is fine. I think the main problem with the original X-Men trilogy as a whole is their boner for Wolverine and their hate-boner for Cyclops. He does barely anything important for the first two movies and then dies in this one, which makes his death hard to care about. X2 already heavily focused on Logan, so I think his arc should've been given to Scott. Wouldn't it be more effective if Scott had lots of development in this one, and then had to be the one to kill Jean? Logan and Jean's relationship was never believable for this film's finale to work. Jean Grey is the crux of the entire story, and despite this, she is sidelined and treated like a prop for the entire story until she dies.

After a brief respite in "X2" (2003) we have reverted to the rather procedural and unexciting format for this third instalment of malevolent mutant-mayhem. This time "Magneto" (Sir Ian McKellen) is outraged when the human government develops a top secret cure for mutants. On the face of it, this is going to lead to another simple battle royal between the forces of our man-metal and his eternal nemesis "Xavier" (Patrick Stewart) and his army of fair-minded supporters led by "Wolverine" (Hugh Jackman). Thing is, though, "Magneto" has an ace up his sleeve in the form of the "Dark Phoenix" that has turned "Jean Gray" (Famke Janssen) into something more lethal than anyone can imagine. Can she be stopped, persuaded, destroyed? It's really a bit of same old, same old, this - great visual effects, loads of pyrotechnics and a good old dose of good versus evil, but the story is actually pretty weak and the dialogue seems to regurgitate much of that from the first film. Jackman really tries to inject a sense of thrill into this, and there's no denying that Ben Foster looks particularly hot with his angelic wings, but otherwise it might as well be another episode in a Marvel mini-series that you just know will deliver nothing more at the end than an opportunity for a sequel. It is a good looking film, but the two leads are overly hammy, and Kelsey Grammer isn't the only one to feel a bit blue at the seriously over-orchestrated denouement.

I'm surprised to see a big drop in average rating for this. I enjoyed 'X-Men: The Last Stand' to be honest. Taking a quick look at some other reviews and it seems to main gripe is how it treats certain characters from the comics, which is fair enough for sure but that doesn't come into play for me as I'm not a comic reader. I can only judge it as a film and as one I found it suitably entertaining. Hugh Jackman remains the top dog, though at the beginning the way Wolverine acts felt off to me - though that quickly went away. I would've liked if they found a spot for Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), though one of his replacements in Beast (Kelsey Grammer) went down well with me. From what I read I can understand other people's complaints with this, especially with the aforementioned iffy character treatment, but I gotta be honest and say that I found it to be a good enough watch - even if it is comparatively the weakest entry of the original trilogy. /copied directly from my Letterboxd review\