X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

X-Men 3 is an exercise in incompetence and was so before filming even started. Originally Brian Singer was going to hammer Superman out and immediately get back to Fox to do X-Men 3. Instead Fox turned into a 3 year old who doesn’t get their way and fired him, thereby giving Singer all the time in the world to ruin Superman. They then hired British director Matthew Vaughn, who had directed the fantastic gangster flick L4yer Cake. However Vaughn quickly left stating that he didn’t want to be away from his family, but this absolutely stunk as PR chafe. A little digging found that Fox was rushing production to try and get their movie out before Singer’s in yet another childish move. So their next move was to create the ultimate in Hollywood Yes-men team of Brett Rattner directing and Zak Penn writing.

Every success in X-Men 3 is also a failure. We finally get to see a Danger Room sequence that includes Sentinels, but all we see are their eyes glowing in the dark until Wolverine has Colossus throw him at a Sentinel where we hear claws striking metal and a large head comes crashing down with Wolverine still attached to the back of it. One scene, three failures: 1) as mentioned you never actually see a Sentinel. 2) Colossus throwing Wolverine is a classic X-Men thing called a Fastball Special, but the way they do it just looks utterly silly. 3) when the Sentinel head crashes down, Wolverine is very clearly not hanging on to it but then it slides to a stop and he suddenly walks out from behind it.

New characters are introduced on both sides. For the X-Men we get Hank McCoy, Beast (played by Kelsey Grammer), which is easily the one thing they got right in the movie, massive credit to Grammer for that. Then there’s Warren Worthington III, Angel, shown heavily in trailers, a very major character in the history of the X-Men, and terribly wasted here. They try to use him to tell a moral story but I’m not sure what that is. See his father is the primary financial backer for a new mutant cure and wants his son to be cured. His son doesn’t want to be cured so he flies from California to New York to seek shelter within the Xavier institute. Then he disappears until the end when he saves his dad from falling to his death. This actually leads to another MAJOR problem but I’ll get to that in a moment.

On Magneto’s side of this whole thing we’re first re-introduced to Pyro who’s now suddenly a psychopath. Then we meet a bunch of supporting mutant characters that exist just to make comic fans angry. There’s Calisto who in the comics only has heightened senses and is a strong fighter, now she can move really fast and has the incredibly plot convenient ability to locate mutants and know what their powers are. There’s Kid Omega and no one knows why he’s called that since all he can do is sprout spikes. Even later then we get to meet the Juggernaut, now apparently a mutant who’s back story has nothing to do with Charles Xavier where in the comics they are step-brothers and Juggernaut isn’t a mutant. And to close we also get Jamie Maddrox, the Multiple Man, who as one would imagine can create duplicates of himself and in the comics has never been a villain. He’s only used for one scene after this and it’s painfully plot convenient since Magneto met Maddrox by coincidence while freeing Juggernaut. To sum up, the amount of plot convenient powers in Magneto’s little army is ridiculous.

Getting back to the problem brought up at the end of Angel’s description, there are two primary locations in this movie; the X-Mansion located in upstate New York, and Magneto’s base camp located in San Francisco, California, yet somehow people regularly travel back and forth between the two in a matter of minutes. I can let a lot of things slide, but this is just flat out stupid. It’s so stupid I can’t even think of a witty joke about it. And the fact that it happens more than once is absolutely infuriating.

Another key plot point in this is the return of Jean Grey, now known as the Phoenix, an alternate personality her mind developed at a young age. I’m just going to skip over all of that stuff though since I really want to get to the heart of the matter; the final fight. The money shot. The one thing that should make every horrible thing in this movie worth sitting through. Instead it’s just a cluster fuck of nonsense. At this point Magneto has gained Phoenix as an ally and located the source of the cure, a young mutant he openly plans to kill. He’s being kept on Alcatraz so Magneto gathers his army of idiots onto the Golden Gate Bridge and breaks off a chunk of it to transport his army to the island, where he could have just as easily moved the chunk of the bridge with nobody on it, and dropped it on the building. Then he sends his army to fight the soldiers sporting plastic guns (so that Magneto can’t stop them) that shoot darts loaded with the cure, because they’re just pawns thereby showing that Magneto does care about mutant kind (that’s sarcasm, by the way), and when his army starts loosing he yells at Phoenix to do something, because apparently he didn’t actually have a plan for her other than to get her on his side. Oh and did I mention that Magneto wanted to stop the cure because he knew the government would make a weapon out of it, while the government wasn’t forcing the cure on anybody but did develop the guns that shoot the cure for the sole purpose of defending humans from aggressive mutants, specifically Magneto? I didn’t? Well there you go. The whole final attack by Magneto actually proved that he’s wrong and incompetent.

This movie completely feels like it was done by a different crew. The only thing linking it to the previous movies is where the story picks up. The things that didn’t make sense in the first two were things that dawned on you when you think about it, but in this everything is just falling apart immediately.

Marvel Movie Score: 3

Why That?: While I honestly believe that I can actually find more flaws in this movie than Blade Trinity (as usual I did not name nearly all of them here), it had just enough things to give it just one more point. I think it’s because it’s easier to watch and more fun to pick apart. Also of note is the revelation that Singer’s version was going to gently shift the focus away from Wolverine and bring it to Jean and Scott in the same way that the Phoenix Saga did. At least one good thing came out of X-Men 3, and that’s this image of Famke Janssen as Jean Grey that was put on the backer board of the Jean Grey action figure. Show me your “Oh” face next, Miss Janssen.