Half the movie of the previous X-Men.

Rating: 6/10 (19 April 2010)

It doesn't take long to see that The Last Stand has a very different director than X2, and it also doesn't take long to figure out what Brett Ratner's philosophy for the third X-Men movie is. MORE! BIGGER! More mutants! More action scenes! Bigger explosions! More special effects! X-Men 3 tops X2 in all those areas I just mentioned, but it's definitely not the better movie.
The main area I think The Last Stand suffers in, is the story. They took two absolutely huge stories that easily required their own movies (the Dark Phoenix and the mutant "cure"), sand tried to stuff them all together into one plot. It just doesn't work well. Events seem too hurried and under-developed, and after the solid story of the last movie, that just isn't acceptable.
I understand that story choices have to be made, and they won't always be made in the way I would do things, but the large body count and drastic character changes just seemed unwise, to me. X-men 3 is a decent movie, and nowhere near the horrible disaster that was still to come in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but this pales in comparison to its predecessor.