Did some of you even see the same movie I did?

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2006)

I am honestly baffled how some of you were satisfied with the movie. Certainly there was potential, but to say that it merited 7+ stars is ridiculous in the extreme. Have you come to expect so little from Hollywood that anything that offers you meaningless action sequences with no character depth or story earns your approval? I was immensely pleased with the first two movies. This one...not so much. It felt like the plot could better be summed up as "hey, let's go fight over here! Now let's go fight over here!" Very little care is given to story or to character dialogue, focus or continuity. There are entirely too many characters and not enough time spent with any of them (with the possible exception of Storm). Professor X's conversation with Wolverine in the infirmary and Magneto's reaction to Mystique's transformation are examples of how Ratner just doesn't "get" the characters. Gone are the clever quips, the speeches all sound cheesy, and the tragedies almost superfluous.
I purposefully dodged reading reviews or watching material before I saw the movie. I didn't want any preconceptions going in. I will admit to being very nervous when I heard that Singer was out and Ratner was in because I knew the whole Phoenix thing was a delicate story to have to work with and nothing in Ratner's portfolio suggested to me that he knew how to be delicate with anything. Sadly my misgivings were justified. I wanted to like X3. As a fan of the whole X-Men franchise since I was a teenager, I probably would have been willing to overlook some of the flaws were the director's touches not so gratuitously ham-fisted. It's not that it's a BAD movie. It's just not a great one...and it's not even a good one for a discriminating X-Men fan.
I will echo what has been said elsewhere...Singer better present us with a masterpiece with Superman, because he really did drop the ball in ditching X-Men and whether or not he had a direct hand in its failure, I hold his decision at least partly responsible for the outcome of this movie. Maybe that's not fair, but there it is.