Sadly silly, badly mishandled

Rating: 2/10 (11 June 2006)

Good Things About X-men 3:
1. Hugh Jackman's butt 2. Magneto moves the Golden Gate Bridge 3. People explode. 4. The script is hilarious.
Bad Things About X-men 3:
1. Hugh Jackman falls to his knees and wails "Noooooo." Twice. 2. The Golden Gate Bridge moves to an over-dramatic operatic soundtrack. 3.People explode again and again and again. 4. The script is hilarious.
This is a flabby movie. While I laughed throughout because the script and the direction were so absurd, they might have been passable in a tight little action number like X2. The writing in the first 2 movies isn't particularly effective on a line to line level, but it serves because the stories and the direction are so tight and packed; X3 is wearing horizontal stripes. Its flaws are magnified. The scope of this movie is too large, and some potentially interesting thematics become boring, melodramatic stretches where action sequences might better have gone. Some people dismiss the X-men movies as spectacle; I wish X3 had been more of one.