Brett Ratner;The new Joel Schumacher?

Rating: 3/10 (2 December 2006)

Can we say Batman Forever? Seriously this movie really reminds me of Joel Schumacher's attempt to make a Batman movie. Both X-Men 3 and Batman Forever suffer from the same problem. They took everything that made the first two movies in their respective franchises good, and threw it out the window and instead made a run-of-the-mill action movie full of poorly written dialog and very little substance or character development.
X-Men and X-Men 2 were both fairly well written for comic book movies. The writers and the directors took the stories very seriously, and made 2 very good movies about intolerance and prejudice. X-Men 3 was not at all well written, it was just filled with cheesy one-liners and pointless dialog. I have nothing against cheesy one-liners, both X-Men and X-Men 2 had their fair share. X-Men 3 however has no well written dialog to mix with the cheesy one-liners.
There was also a whole lot of pointless dialog in the film; I seriously got tired of people announcing that they were going to use their powers. Just use the powers, don't inform me that you are getting ready to. The worst example of this is when Wolverine and Storm go back to the lake where Jean had been killed. It is extremely foggy and Wolverine and Storm walk around in the fog for a minute until Wolverine comments that he can not see anything, at which point Storm decides that clearing the fog would be a good idea. Why didn't she just clear the fog as soon as they got off the Jet, why did she have to wait for Wolverine to inform him that she couldn't see? Because of all this bad and pointless dialog it seriously felt as if some of the really good actors in the movie were not giving their best performances. I don't blame them, they did the best they could with the dialog that they were given.
While we are on the subject of pointless things in the movie (slight spoilers beyond), why did the two mutants take Warren Worthington to the roof of the building to throw him off to kill him? Why didn't they just use their powers to kill him right away if they wanted him dead? This was done for no other reason than to give Angel the chance to swoop in and save his father. This was just a totally poorly written and unbelievable scenario.
Also the actions sequences seem to come right out of one of those Live, Action/Aventure shows you see at theme parks like Six Flags and Kings Dominion. I'm not sure if it was the obvious wire work on Storm's flying, or maybe the cheesy entrances that each of the characters made, or what. Something about the entire sequence just gave me that whole cheesy vibe that you get while watching one of those shows.
This movie tried to have the same type of substance that the first two had but it failed miserably. Ratner just doesn't seem to know how to include the substance and underlying messages in his film the way Singer did. The message was in there, but it was secondary to the action, and it wasn't brought to the surface in any way, shape or form. It was mostly just lame dialog proclaiming that the cure is evil and that they must destroy it. All of this had potential to be as good as the first two, but it just was not handled well at all by Ratner.