A disappointing follow-up to X-Men 1 and 2

Rating: 6/10 (1 June 2006)

I was really looking forward to this movie, but I was disappointed. The acting and special effects were great, and the story had a lot of potential, but the movie just wasn't put together in a gripping, exciting way.
The superhero characters I have enjoyed getting to know through X-Men 1 and 2 are still there, but instead of doing cool stuff, they just strut around, serving the script. I feel their passion, but not their motivation.
At the end of a huge tragic scene, some of the characters start crying. When this happened, I felt suddenly catapulted out of the mood of the movie; I was just watching the actors cry, and I felt nothing, because the movie had done such a terrible job of telling the story during that scene.
One of the things I like about X-Men 1 and 2 was that the movies and characters are so strongly grounded in reality. X-Men 3 is closer to its comic-book origins, and suffers because of it. The comic-book X-Men have fantastical histories; almost all of them have died and/or lost their mutant powers multiple times. For me, the strength of the first two movies is being able to identify with the characters, even while being awed by their powers. In this movie, reality is a distant memory, and the mutants' powers are little more than a special-effects freakshow.