Pales to the original

Rating: 6/10 (27 March 2012)

"X-Men: The Last Stand" pretends to be a sequel to X2, but ultimately, this film builds on the bones of what came before, rather than on the solid, already established foundation. Characters are dismissed with perfunctory waves of the hand, or "revealed" to have always been the exact opposite of everything we were told before, specifically in the case of Jean Grey. The treatment of Jean invokes the worst excesses of comic books (namely, retroactive continuity or the "retcon,") while losing whatever emotional pathos was involved in the source material.
Most egregious, however, is the finale. The X-Men rush into defend something without really explaining why it's important, and their goals and the stakes they are playing for constantly shift. While you never quite get to the point where the story doesn't make sense, it's safe to say that the motivations never make sense, if only because there are no motivations. There are certainly some good action scenes, but overall it's hard to enjoy this even as mindless action because moronic director Brett Ratner gets so bogged down in the process of pissing on all the plot lines and characters that he inherited from Bryan Singer's vastly superior work.