Deteriorated to a slightly-above-average action movie for tabloid readers

Rating: 6/10 (31 May 2006)

(Spoilers ahead!) While the movie itself was fun to watch alright it left me with the feeling of something missing. Compared to its predecessors it is a good action movie, but that's about it. While X1 and 2 made good efforts to tune the viewer for the different party's points of view, i.e. how the masses are afraid of the unknown, how fear helps the wrong people seize power and misuse it and weave personal crusades into that story it seems worn out and carelessly rehashed in X3. The Angel character would have deserved a deeper plot, instead we were served a fast food ethics lesson "dad embarrassed because of mutant son wants cure son gives the finger and rescues dad from villains with the once damned mutant powers". That boy cutting the wings off his back realizes how it is wrong to fight his nature and that he's been trying to comfort his dad's ego all the time in less than 10 seconds - the character didn't develop during the movie. Talking about villains, Ratner paints a pretty dumb black/white image here. That congregation in the woods looks like most concerts I visited, and instead of Magneto and Xavier forming the light/shadow complement that provides both characters with the necessary reference to each other in the big picture of events, Magneto here is Yet Another Supervillain which for some reason needs to be stopped at all costs for doing.. um, well, something villainous or so. In X1/2 Magneto was usually fighting with the wrong means - but for the right cause. X3 fails to build up this fabric where cause and effect are a carefully balanced whole that Penn/Hayter/Singer only needed to tip at the edges and let it develop in the viewer's head. After all ethics/morale discussion is made obsolete by running the viewer through predefined patterns and paths, still the movie tries to invoke emotions and again doesn't do too well: Most of the interesting characters are killed (or deprived of their mutant nature, which comes down to the same for Mystique for example), some as a surprise to the viewer but quite obviously to evade being predictable (like the Rogue romance, which by the way was the only thing Rogue was good for in X3 - seems like the director lacks imagination to make something out of her).
If there's gonna be another sequel, better let someone else write it. 6 instead of 5 out of 10 for fun popcorn cinema and hilarious visual effects, but nowhere near the well deserved 7+ of X-Men and X2.