The worst film of the year

Rating: 1/10 (11 June 2006)

I went to see this movie with high hopes and an open mind, as the previous X-Men films have remained to be one of my favourite comic-to-film conversions to date. Mainly because they took a comic series which was great to read and could have been disastrous on screen, but ended up being great films. However, with most of the production crew changed, it was instantly recognisable that there was a different feel and less intelligent driving force behind the third instalment of the X-Men series, in which there were too many things that were not handled well.
The first fifteen minutes of the film did give me high hopes, as I saw a lot of things from the comic come to life on screen such as a The Morlocks and the training room scene (I'm trying not to dwell too much on the comics). However these hopes were soon crushed as soon I realised this film was nothing more than a series of action sequences put together around a really poor idea.
Bryan Singer and Bret Ratner clearly had different visions for the X-Men series. Bryan Singer opted for the storyline based approach, providing a decent background for each character he involved and making everything move at a steady pace, where as Brett Ratner decided to go to town with the special effects crew, giving this film as much depth as a teaspoon and cramming it all in to about 100 minutes. What really annoyed me was how Brett Ratner was undoing all the work that Bryan Singer had done, mainly by killing of characters for no apparent reason, changing the personality of existing characters and putting in a lot of nonsense scenes in just so he could introduce some new character! It also seemed like Brett Ratner had no clue how to continue where Bryan Singer had left off in the second film with the Phoenix storyline and simply decided to make Jean Grey do an impression of Carrie throughout the film and ruin that story. I personally think it should have been left out entirely as it is too big a storyline to be a sub plot and instead should have had its own film dedicated to it.
There are, however, a few good points to this film too. For example, Halle Berry played the part of Storm as a stronger character and had more screen time, which allowed her to become like the Storm from the comics and gave a good performance doing so. It was also nice to see Juggernaut, played by Vinnie Jones, on screen, although it's not much of a stretch for Vinnie Jones to play an angry thug.The best thing about this movie was Kelsey Grammar's whose performance of Beast was great and was definitely the highlight of the film for me.
Overall this film had no lasting emotion or substance to it and the closing scenes emphasise that. After seeing this film it did make me appreciate how much of a good job Bryan Singer had done for the first two X-Men movies and filled me with a lot of hope and anticipation for Superman Returns.