A Tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Rating: 1/10 (29 May 2006)

Although it would be easy to blame Director Brett Ratner for all of the faults of X-Men: The Last Stand, (and indeed his poor sense of pacing, drama, emotional resonance and anything remotely resembling subtlety does greatly hamper X3), the blame must be shared with the Screenwriters, Actors, crew and the Studio who likely rushed this film through production so that it could land in theaters in advance of Super Returns. Despite its bombastic score, numerous explosions and gee whiz power animations, X3 more closely resembles "World's most expensive Power Rangers episode" than a true sequel to either of the preceding X-men films. You can sense that the people behind the film so desperately want it to be more that it winds up being a whole lot less. There is nothing as diabolically inventive as Magneto's escape from his plastic prison in X2, Nor is there is an action scene as kinetically charged as Nightcrawler's assault on the White House. All of the fight scenes seem flat, choreographed and by-the-numbers. Wolverine slices things, Storm does a really ridiculous spinning kick with shockingly bad wire-work; if you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much seen the movie. While there are a few impressive special effects, (despite its rather blatant use of haunted house clichés, there's one scene that shows the effects of telekinetics in an almost engaging manner) there are also plenty of dreadful ones; an attempt at de-aging two characters early makes their faces look as if they were coated in silly putty, one character jumps into battle so unrealistically it appears as if he'd been rotoscoped in.
None of the good special effects make up for the fact that the characterization is minimal. Major characters get few lines, (although this may be a good thing, as the dialogue is trite and cliché ridden) and minor characters may as well be interchangeable. The film attempts to substitute a heavy-handed score for actual development to terrible effect. Worse, some of the characters act in manners completely contrary to how they were portrayed in the two prior films. Professor X behaves like a total bastard through much of the movie.
Were this not purported to be a sequel to X3, it would be a harmlessly forgettable bad summer movie replete with orange fireballs, cleavage, mass destruction with little actual storytelling getting in the way. However, since it has placed itself as the end of a trilogy, it ends up being an offensive act of noisy destruction that sullies the other two X-films by association.