Decent summer flick, bad X-Men movie

Rating: 5/10 (2 June 2006)

First of all, I agree with 90% of what the harsher reviewers are saying but I still felt the movie was enjoyable. I would not go any farther than using that word but I thought it was satisfying from a typical movie-goer's standpoint. The problem however is that I am a huge X-Men fan and from that perspective I was greatly disappointed.
To be honest, I find it hard to believe that the writers, Ratner or whoever is responsible read up THAT much on the X-Men. It seemed like they either a) watched the previous 2 movies ONLY, b) read a very slim portion of the comics or c) picked up one of those X-Men character guide/encyclopedias and felt that that was enough to start creating.
Singer's two X-movies were a textbook example of being faithful to the source material but changing things for the sake of cinema and plot that did not disrespect the source material and were also interesting at the same time. They were also RELEVANT.
One general beef I have with superhero movies is that they have a habit of resisting to introduce some of the most popular and/or significant characters (i.e., no Venom in Spider-Man). X-Men falls in this category as well. It took 3 movies for Beast to show up and we STILL have not seen Gambit. Instead we get Kitty Pryde and Colossus, the latter of which I have no problem with but they did not use him really at all. Also, Sabretooth isn't dead we all know that so bring him back and a couple more popular villains. I'm also sick of every new X-Man introduced having to be between the ages of 12-18 but that's just me. It just seems like no one has any experience except for the main characters and that doesn't have to be.
Now, on to this movie itself as an installment. The deaths were pointless and inexcusable. When Cyclops bit the dust you figured it was because Phoenix was going to go on a cold-hearted rampage since she was not herself. But no, it turned out his death really served no purpose or reasoning just like Xavier's. Did Xavier annoy her that much with his pleading that she had to kill him and not Magneto or anyone else? Phoenix's whole role was waaaay too reminiscent of a young Darth Vader from a terrible film I'd rather not mention here. Plus she had no relevant impact on the film, just killing for shock value's sake (and to give hardcore fans a heart attack).
I felt one huge flaw that would've made the others much easier to swallow was that the movie couldn't decide whether to go with the cure plot or the phoenix plot so it ended up with both and with neither being explored hardly at all. Going with one (the cure and what it would mean for mutantkind) or another (X-Men vs. Magneto vying for 'control' of Phoenix) would have served the movie much, much better in my opinion.
Lastly we have the characterizations. This is what I hold as evidence that the creative team only had a bare bones knowledge of the X-Men universe. Storm was giving a bigger role which, contrary to what others are saying, I didn't mind and I thought she was decent. Wolverine was just kind of there and didn't really have a personality in my opinion. Rogue was useless yet again save for serving as a plot device in the cure plot that was never realized. She just takes the cure and all of a sudden she's no longer relevant after being on screen for about 10 minutes total. Professor X was a little bit of a jerk but it didn't bother me as much as some. I thought Beast was done quite well actually. Lastly, I had my eyes on Colossus getting more screen time ever since the last movie but got screwed out of that. The last film sets it up perfectly for him to get in on the action this time around but I guess it was ignored. Angel had almost no relevance except to look cool for the trailer, as others have said.
As far as the bad guys, Magneto was basically a classic bad guy instead of the yin to Xavier's yang like he should be. He had no real ideology in this movie, just being a bad guy. Pyro's character has not been developed at all since the last movie and he definitely doesn't seem strong enough to be Magneto's supporting character like Mystique was, who by the way go screwed by Magneto which was very uncharacteristic of him. Juggernaut was bad, bad, bad but if you've seen one drawing of him it's obvious his character isn't made for live action so I don't know why they even attempted it. Multiple Man (Madrox) was underused and they could've found many creative ways to use him. The rest just felt like randoms thrown in there with the exception of Callisto who we know nothing about anyways.
Reading these reviews also brought something new to my attention that I took for granted: What was the point of it all and how did the events in the movie all of a sudden make everything okay? I think I would have been much more critical had I realized this terrible oversight but again as I said if you don't get too emotional about the source material I think you can at least enjoy it, although I can't blame you if you can't help it.