Warning - comment contains one rabid fangirl and a barrel full of spoilers

Rating: 4/10 (26 September 2006)

After two flashback sequences (one quite interesting and with plenty of fuel for the good ship Chuck/Eric, though it hardly adds to your love of Jean, one touching but fairly pointless and heavy-handed way of introducing yet more backstory) X-Men 3 gets off to a good (read; geek pleasing) start sentinels (wow!), the hardball special (wow!), the first hints of a Bobby/Kitty/Rogue love triangle (which like everything else in the threequel will not be explored to anywhere near its full potential, but seeing as we don't know that yet, ooh!) and a decent danger room sequence But from thereon in, when we get our first glimpse of angst-ridden Scott, and the Prof makes the "I won't be here much longer speech", you can pretty much see how this is going to pan out - a not totally pleasant mixture of emo-esquire angst and impressive, though hollow, set pieces.
It's irritating, especially since Brett Ratner tries so hard to make you believe that hes up to something progressive, exciting and daring (several major - and I mean REALLY major - deaths fairly early on in the film always making for one hell of a calling card), the main problem being that Ratner throws us bones but no real meat. To cite just a few examples of strands which could be so much more richly exploited Rogue's temptation to be normal (depressingly reduced to little more than lusting after Bobby), the caged/free dynamic between Logan and Jean (*start shippery rant* which might well have been the one saving grace for JeanWolf, given that that dynamic should NEVER have existed anyway... *end shippery rant*), the Phoenix entity (who really does little more than glower and smoulder) and - shock horror - the main Mutant Cure plot, which becomes little more than a way of propelling us from one "ooh look, an obscure mutant from the comic... being killed" battle sequence to another. Mainstream audiences would probably be annoyed enough by this, but for us fan-boys and girls there's a whole other level; the total shameless bastardisation of the Dark Phoenix saga, popularly regarded as the masterpiece of the series and reduced from EPIC to a pathetic excuse for Wolverine to act all tormented and stuff, and a little of the ol Tyler Durden, again falling woefully flat, by means of explanation for the Phoenix's presence. Makes you wonder why they bothered, really, other than to link it to the comics. True, God Loves, Man Kills on which X2 was based, bore little relation to the filmic version, but at least that made sense. Grr.
Okay, its not a bad film. It could even be called Mindless Fun provided those of us who give a damn about the comic-verse can truly become mindless. But then again, if you weren't a fan of the comics or the cartoon, then there's probably far better mindless actioners out there (even the dire M:I-iii springs to mind) sans deliberate fan-boy pleasers (Mutant Spotter checklist at the ready!) and plus a whole lot more sense. All in all, not an especially fabulous Final Stand and, if the end is anything to go by, they can't even pull off Final properly. Our only hope, brothers, is that the almost inevitable X4 is far better