Not bad... not bad.

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2006)

Well the hype for this movie on me has come and gone faster then you can say Ratner will ruin the X-Men franchise. But come to find out that he didn't totally destroy everything we hold dear and that he actually delivered a entertaining comic book ride from start to finish.
This film follows our heroes as they and the rest of the mutant community try to cope with the discovery of a cure to their mutant powers. The mutants struggle with the decision to get rid of their powers and become human or decide once and for all if they want to stay as they were. The humans on the other side feel otherwise, they see the mutant gene as a disease and want the cure to be mandatory. But this merely adds as a backdrop to the real problem plaguing everyone-- Jean Grey didn't die at the end of the second film and she's a whole different woman now.
The main problem I had with this film is there is just too much trying to be accomplished here. It's just not all the different mutants, there are two main stories intertwining with each other the whole way through and not once did I ever become interested in any of it. I didn't care too much whatsoever about Phoenix and her problems, and I sure as hell didn't care about the "mutant cure". The cure is introduced and then that's it, we never see the emotional tug it has on the world. We just see political heads wondering how it will all play out. We needed the film to focus on one of these aspects, not try to nudge both of them into the cracks. That leads me to the mutants themselves. There are so many new mutants that they are given little to do. Beast I'm sorry to say was just blah as they come. I loved the Kelsey Grammar casting job but he should of been given more screen time. Hell at times I forgot that there were more then just Storm and Wolverine on the X-Men. Colossus, Rogue, and Iceman had nothing memorable to talk about, and Angel has to be the most underused character since Darth Maul. There is no excuse for any of this, and I'm pretty sure the studio pressure to meet the release date had a lot to do with it. The new brotherhood mutants were lame, they all had peelings and tattoos to make them seem like they were cool, but they were surely not. The only new villain that I appreciated was Juggernaut. Vinne Jones own this role like no other, and delivers one classic line towards the end that I will soon not forget (had the whole theater rolling). Oh and is it me or does this film make Wolverine seem like a total wuss? Like seriously, some of those one-liners had to go.
On the positive side of things, the special effects were great. Along with the set pieces they never looked better, the FX team did a outstanding job. Ratner's directing was good, you could tell he followed Singer's style of the series but none of the substance. The emotional involvement was barely there and it seems like character deaths were created to stand in place of dramatic storytelling. In light of this the climax was very nice and I liked where this film left off.
All in all X3 is a highly enjoyable flick. Is it the finish we all wanted out of this franchise? No, but this movie sure isn't the disaster we all thought it would be.