An insult to the first two movies

Rating: 1/10 (9 June 2006)

Warning: major spoilers ahead.
Decades ago, Marvel Comics showed that for comic books to be more than the lightest of entertainments, they needed to focus on real, complex characters and well-thought out stories. The first two movies did just this. The 3rd movie is so awful as to insult its predecessors as well as its audience. It's so bad that the depths of its failures cannot be adequately addressed in a 1000-word review.
The movie takes two potentially fascinating story lines -- the discovery of a "cure" for mutation and the resurrection of Jean Gray as the tremendously powerful but out-of-control Phoenix, and squeezes the life and sense out of them. The story lurches and jolts along to a predictable and needlessly violent ending, featuring mutants murdering each other willy-nilly in a festival of showy, senseless explosions and second-rate wire-flying and special effects. Whereas the X-Men previously tried manfully to avoid killing others, humans or mutants, now even the most morally upright of the group, Storm, seems to take vicious pleasure in killing for the sake of killing.
The setup is tossed off: suddenly, in a complete and unexplained turnaround from the first two movies, mutants are living openly and with apparent acceptance by the majority of the population. Such a condition was hinted at with the end of the second movie, but such a sea change needs more development than a simple "here's how it is now" presentation. Seeing hundreds of mutants peacefully protesting for their rights turns them into just another interest group and guts the entire thematic heart of the series.
And what was done to the characters is sheer tragedy. Scott Summers, an interesting if underused character in the first two movies, is killed as an afterthought in the first few minutes; Jean, his murderer, seems barely aware or concerned that she has killed the man she supposedly loves. Professor Xavier is killed almost as cavalierly; the exploration of what will happen to the X-Men and the school is handled with no depth or feeling whatsoever. (It's almost good riddance; the deeply philosophical, ethically driven Professor of the first two movies becomes a pontificating blowhard here, saying nothing of interest except to tell the audience what it needs to know about "class 5 mutants" and a tissue-thin, mindlessly stupid explanation of Jean's mental condition before Jean blows him into atoms. Even the amazingly talented Patrick Stewart can do nothing with the character as written.) The handling of Mystique, a powerful and fascinating villain, is a slap in the face to the character -- in the first two movies, she is tremendously capable and endlessly inventive, but here she is at first a mere thug, then a sullen traitor to the cause, babbling all of Magneto's secrets to the people she has spent a lifetime fighting against. The subtleties of the other leading characters -- Logan, Storm, Magneto, Bobby -- are lost; instead we get mindless rants or cheesy tough-guy asides. Only the character of Hank McCoy is given any development whatsoever, and his "transformation" from glad-handing politician into violent mutant combatant is abrupt and inexplicable; all the credit belongs to actor Kelsey Grammar. Logan is as two-dimensional now as he was complex and compelling in the first movies, jumping from father-figure and protector to thuggish murderer, with no thought except how to kill as many "enemies" as possible. Magneto, once a deeply sympathetic antagonist whose methods are as wrong as his ideals are laudable, becomes a cardboard villain, a bobble-head Hitler, forgetting entirely his defining experiences as a Holocaust victim even as he displays his number tattoo to his gang of thugs. And Jean...perhaps her treatment is worst of all. Instead of exploring the depth of her transformation into the unstable Phoenix, she becomes a two-dimensional schizophrenic, either lashing out in gleefully wanton destruction or dissolving in tears, begging Logan to kill her (when he does, her death is neither shocking nor tragic, just overdue).
Rogue is virtually ignored; though her decision to become an ordinary human could have been explored in all of its dimensions, she comes across as simply a mealy-mouthed whiner. Angel, a linchpin of the early comic stories, is thoroughly unnecessary; apparently his entire character was included merely so his winged dive out of a high-rise window can be used in the commercials. Bobby's dilemma -- coward or hero, or merely teenager? -- is discarded in favor of a quick, meaningless battle between him and Pyro, whose own complexities have been forgotten in his transformation into a sulky thug. The lesser characters are wasted entirely. Colossus's entire function is to throw Logan into his enemies like a slingshot. Juggernaut becomes a leering, easily defeated idiot. The child whose blood is used to transform mutants into ordinary mortals merely sits in a room watching television until he can be rescued -- we find out absolutely nothing about his feelings at being used as a tool. A dozen other mutants, many favorites of the readers like Jubilee or Arclight, merely walk on, throw a mutant effect, and disappear.
As far as I'm concerned, this series stopped with the second movie. The third movie is an object lesson in everything that can go wrong with a movie made from a comic book. I honestly think I put more work into writing this review than the writers did in their script. Director Brett Ratner and writers Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn should be ashamed for the hateful disservice they have done to the X-Men and to their loyal fans. The last scene, which hints at a return of Magneto's eradicated powers, points to a possible fourth movie. God, I hope not. Ratner, Kinberg, and Penn have killed this series. Let it stay dead.