X-Men: The Last Stand

X-Men 3: The Last Stand is not a travesty, but it is a disappointment. After the rich, textured storytelling of X2, The Last Stand plays like a rushed, shallow, money-hungry installment that doesn’t bode well for the future of the franchise. If you love the X-Men -- the history, the characters, the themes -- X-Men 3 will likely break your heart. If your interest in the X-Men is anything less, you’ll likely be moderately entertained by the spectacle. Like I said, the film is not a travesty, but it is a disappointment.

For X-Men fans, X3 feels a little like an out-of-body experience. We recognize the faces on the screen, yet there’s a feeling of surreal weightlessness, as if what we’re seeing doesn't quite feel real. This displacement can be attributed largely to the much ballyhooed change in director from visionary Bryan Singer to the soulless Brett Ratner. Singer brought a human touch of character and pathos to the first two installments of the franchise. Ratner goes a different route, taking the characters we’ve grown to love and setting them up like G.I. Joes in a prepubescent sandbox war and then turning on the garden hose.

Ratner takes an ethically and morally charged plotline -- a “cure” has been found for mutants -- and uses it as a flimsy framework to hang a handful of overblown (and forgettable) action scenes. The issues of such a cure -- Should mutants want it? How should mutants treat those who choose to take it? Should mutants be given a choice? -- are all glossed over quickly and unsatisfactorily. Who needs moral dilemmas and character development when we can pull the Golden Gate Bridge off its moorings? Those small character scenes that made X2 more than just your typical summer action fare -- Storm and Nightcrawler discussing their feelings towards homo-sapiens, Magneto charming Pyro -- are nowhere to be found in X3. It’s just your typical summer movie -- flashy, shallow, and empty of the human spirit. And after Bryan Singer showed that these films can be so much more than that, it really hurts to see this franchise treated with such casual indifference on the part of Ratner and 20th Century Fox.

I could go on and on about the plotting and abysmal treatment of the X-Men canon -- the fact that Dark Phoenix and Sentinels are basically afterthoughts in the film -- but it all gets too depressing. And people who loved the first two are going to see the third for the same reasons I did; it couldn’t possibly be as bad as people are saying. Well, it is. For a franchise that was such a thrill in X2 to descend into mediocrity is just inexcusable. For an X-Men movie to be so disposable is unfathomable. And yet, here it is, X3: The Last Stand. Part of me hopes it really isn’t “The Last Stand” for the X-Men, but if this is the sort of effort we’re going to get from Fox from here on out (and with $100 million opening weekend, why should they make any greater effort?) I’d rather they just let the franchise die.