Story from a drunk uncle.

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2006)

Every family has one: that uncle who's full of crap. You know the one I'm talking about  when you were five he told you how he killed a Polar bear with his hands tied behind his back while traveling across the Sahara and dying of thirst while carrying your ol' man on his back after his legs were amputated from WW2.
But he doesn't stop there  oh no. See, he goes to great lengths trying to shock you and gross you out as he describes the gruesome death of the bear. And you quickly learn to never trust a word he says. He opens his mouth, you automatically stop listening, and from that point on his stories have absolutely no power what-so-ever?.
At the end of X-Men 3 I sat through the credits because I swore that that Uncle of mine had a hand in writing after consuming a river of Budweiser. The film asked  nay, it begged me not to take it seriously. Like a piece of fanfiction gone horribly wrong.
Early in the film, we learn that they've discovered a cure for mutancy and also that Mystique has been captured. Magneto of course comes to her rescue in an awesome display of his mastery over magnetism  crushing cars like beer cans, and tossing them aside with equal ease.
But then it turns out the humans have not only found a cure for mutancy, they've shaped it into a weapon. In true cinematic form, one of the "incapacitated" guards makes a final effort to vanquish the mutant attackers and fires upon Magneto. Mystique of course saves Magneto, and Eric (the savior of mutant kind) just leaves her there with a quiet intonation, "Sorry my dear, you're not one of us anymore."
"Not one of us anymore"? I repeated in quiet disbelief as the film goes through a great deal of trouble to imply that Magneto completely abandons perhaps his most loyal ally, someone who fought vigorously for his cause, all over something humans did to her. Granted, I can see Magneto leaving behind mutants, sacrificing mutants, and even outright killing other mutants  but this scenario seemed like the "evil villain killing his own" plot point cut out of another movie and dropped into Magneto's dialogue where it did not belong.
And what was the point of this abandonment? For the tired cinematic "surprise" when the humans close in on Magneto's camp (thanks to a tip from the now human Mystique) to discover he's no longer there. The red flag should go up immediately as the audience realizes the film goes out of its way to never show a clear shot of Magneto's camp nor the mutants occupying it except through overstated symbology.
This move implies Mystique wasn't really abandoned, she was just let go to set this scenario up. Implying that the previous scenes were intentionally shot out of context for the sake of an underwhelming surprise that, honestly, doesn't really come as a surprise.
Now, the problem: this is not an isolated incident in the film. Every tangent of the plot commits a similar sin, "Screw the X-Men, screw the stories, to hell with the powers, screw the characters  we have overused cinematic clichés to cram into this sequel." Angel appears in the film so he can jump out a window and fly away. And hey, because screen time is precious they also used Angel to catch a falling person at the last moment  what a deal, huh?
The Dark Phoenix tangent, a wonderful opportunity to span multiple films with an ongoing saga, exists in X3 for a number of reasons. One being the typical confrontation between an outraged Wolverine who learns Xavier chose the lesser of two evils. True to the cliché the wise Xavier does an abysmally poor job of communicating and justifying his actions. Why can't anyone in films ever do a good job of explaining how sometimes difficult decision have to be made with no real "right" answer? Answer: to vilify Xavier before inevitably discovering he was right all along.
But the real reason for the Dark Phoenix tangent lies in the rule of what must happen to the wise old mentor in motion pictures.
For the rest of the film, the Dark Phoenix is content to stand in the background awaiting her closeup before fulfilling the next chapter in movie clichés 101: where a loved one must deal the fatal blow for a greater good. I won't even begin to go into the potential wasted by not exploring the Phoenix further.
The Unstoppable Juggernaut shows up more or less just to throw Wolverine around, and later chase Shadowcat through walls in one of the more satisfying sequences in the film (with an underwhelming finale, but  ).
As I stated above, I searched the end credits for my uncles name because this film felt like I had sat down for 90 or so minutes of wild and ultimately useless stories pulled from a dark abyss that I don't care to name  stories that had one purpose, and only one purpose: to get some kind of reaction out of me. I just can't take that seriously enough to suspend my disbelief.