I want Bryan Singer back.

Rating: 2/10 (28 May 2006)

This film has three major flaws compared to the previous X-Men films.
1.: It's set up as the final film of a trilogy. The first movie introduced the characters, the second movie started building upon the first. The third one tears everything down. Why? Why aggressively end a successful franchise? Especially if you could replace every character (if an actor doesn't want to reprise the role) with one of the countless mutants in the comic books? The X-Men franchise could have spawned another twenty movies, but no - this has to be the final film. So they kill off characters left and right, take away the powers of important characters from 1 and 2 and basically destroy the franchise. Yeah, I've seen the hidden scene after the credits that would allow a sequel. But unless you take the Halloween H20 (or Superman) approach and ignore everything after #2, it still wouldn't work. How could it work? And it's not like the characters die in the final battle. Most of the major players from the previous movies die (or lose their powers) in the first third of the movie, leaving us with a boring X-Men lineup and a no-name Brotherhood of Mutants.
2.: Too much is going on. The first movie introduced us to the characters, mainly to Wolverine and Rogue. The two of them stumbled into a mutant vs mutant conflict. While it had its twists, the movie was pretty straightforward, tying everything nicely together. The second movie was similar. We already knew the characters, got introduced to another one (Nightcrawler) who stumbled into a mutant vs human conflict. Another straightforward story with a few nice twists, and yet every step logically followed the one before. In X-Men 3, we are flooded with plots. The cure. Angel. Jean Grey. Rogue and Iceman (and Kitty Pryde and Pyro). And while we are waiting for the plot threads to tie together for the showdown, we're already in the middle of it. Very disappointing. Some plots (Angel?) aren't resolved at all. And don't expect to find characterization. We don't even get to know Colossus' name (he gets called "Pete" once, and that's about it). And what happened to Nightcrawler? I'm told that I have to buy or at least play the video game, but just a single line in the movie would have been enough.
3.: I miss the layers. The first film worked on several levels. Of course it was an action movie. A science fiction movie. A superhero movie. But it worked as a metaphor as well. Here we had outcasts of society. A minority looking for their place in the world. One group of mutants assembled around a Malcolm X type character that wanted mutants integrated into society, with brute force - if necessary. The other half of the mutants followed the Martin Luther King type character, who wanted a peaceful coexistence. The second film had one of the best scenes of any comic book adaption. A character comes out of the mutant closet in front of his parents. He is embarrassed. They are shocked. His mother asks him if he ever tried not to be a mutant. And his brother calls the cops. Beautiful, and I'm not gay myself. Movie #3 was nothing but pointless slam-bam-explosions left and right. It's what I'd expect from a Bay or Emmerich film. But not from the X-Men.
All in all, a very unsatisfying and anti-climatic third episode of an otherwise great series. The special effects are the only reason this film gets a "2" instead of a "1".
If you want X-Men, the money is better spent on comic books (or the excellent first two films).