Much of my love for comics began with the X-Men. I read a few issues when I was a kid, and became addicted for many years. So while I’ve long since stopped caring about most of the comics, I still retain a lot of fondness for the characters and themes which the first two films — the second in particular — presented so well.
Of course, the first two films in the series were directed by Bryan Singer, an excellent filmmaker with a great understanding of the X-Men. When he bailed to work on Superman Returns, he was replaced with Brett Ratner, who… is not Bryan Singer. Rattner’s a competent, unspectacular filmmaker, the sort of guy a studio hires when they want a no-muss, no-fuss production that’ll stick to budget and won’t ruffle any feathers. Accordingly, X-Men: The Last Stand is a rather dull film that hits a bunch of plot notes and character moments the fans want, but doesn’t do a whole lot more.
One of the keys to the trilogy comes in X2, when Nighcrawler asks Mystique why she doesn’t use her shape-shifting powers to blend in with all the regular humans. “Because we shouldn’t have to,” she tells him, effectively summing up the entire point of the franchise. It’s telling that the third film, which partly deals with a “cure” for mutants, doesn’t come anywhere close to that kind of insight. Rattner attempts to tell the story in big, bold gestures; everything seems to be Very Important, with terribly serious (and occasionally seriously terrible) lines delivered with great importance by the cast. It all ends up feeling rather condensed, with events unfolding without the character development needed to make them significant.
Many plot lines are edited down to their essence: Jean Grey returns as Phoenix, makes a big mess, then stands around like scenery for an hour, waiting for the big FX finale. Rogue is still upset that her powers won’t let her touch her boyfriend Iceman, who’s beginning to show an interest in the very touchable (if she wants to be) Kitty Pryde. Kelsey Grammer shows up in bad makeup as the Beast to provide exposition on the government’s plans and policies. A rich scientist tries to cure his mutant son. It feels heavily edited, and it should surprise no one if the eventual Special Edition DVD contains 20 or 30 minutes of extra footage.
But the problems go beyond studio time constraints. While Singer was able to cut to the core of the X-Men thematically, Rattner seems to be trying to do it visually. The Last Stand often plays like a Where’s Waldo of Mutants, with characters running around in the background who might look kinda like someone who once appeared in the comics. Yeah, that’s Marrow, and hey, this is Arclight… and the credits tell us that both Kid Omega and Glob Herman made appearances. It might be more interesting if any of them amounted to anything more than scenery or plot points. As it stands, most of the attention is focused on Wolverine, Storm, and Magneto, with Jean mostly standing around and looking contemplative. The Bobby-Kitty-Rogue triangle gets reduced to the most basic elements, which doesn’t really work when it should be the most emotional arc to the film. The Beast seems a totally superfluous character aside from a bit of exposition, and one can’t help but suspect that somehow Frasier got lost on the way to a costume party.
When it comes to summer blockbusters, one can always hope that the action and effects outweigh any deficiencies in storytelling, but The Last Stand falls oddly flat in this area, too. It’s decent, but at no point does it actually WOW! the audience. While X2 built largely around the Wolverine-Deathstrike fight at the end, X3 offers no such thrills; the Wolverine-Juggernaut fight is fairly pedestrian, and the grand melee at the end offers few thrills, aside from Magneto and Pyro’s teamup to throw exploding cars at people. Most of the CGI is either poorly integrated or just plain unimpressive: While Phoenix’s eventual explosion looks pretty cool, it doesn’t interact terribly well with the actual actors; most of the time, it just looks like a nifty little CGI show. And Angel’s wings don’t look particularly convicing, particularly when stacked against the real angel wings in Constantine, which managed to look both majestic and as realistic as could be expected.
Ultimately, The Last Stand ends up looking like the studio concoction everyone was afraid of. It tries to do too much, to shoehorn too many characters and too much story into a cineplex-friendly running time. It tells a straightforward story, gives the stars the screen time, and shows off some acceptable effects, but never manages to say anything new beyond the usual Humans vs. Mutants dynamic, and never offers any emotional connections to the characters. Characters are killed and depowered, but no one cares because they’ve only been on screen for 5 or 10 minutes.
To draw a totally nerdy analogy: The first X-Men film was like the early Lee/Kirby/Adams/Steranko years of the comic, with some great moments but never finding the much-needed consistency. X2 represents the Claremont years, finally figuring out what it was the franchise needed to be successful and building stories around both social commentary and emotional character arcs. And The Last Stand, sadly, finds itself standing among the modern era of X-Men comics, fuelled by events, deaths, and fanboy placation, nearly abandoning quality storytelling in favour of attempts at being really important and meaningful.
The Last Stand does most of what it set out to do, but it didn’t set its sights very high.