Horrifyingly bad

Rating: 1/10 (1 June 2006)

I feel so cheated. Brett Ratner should be blacklisted for completely ruining what had so far been a fantastic series.
I think many people have already said this but what most annoyed me was the total lack of character development. I was very disheartened when I saw in a trailer that Vinnie Jones would be playing the Juggernaut. That gave me my first suspicion that this movie would be truly awful. He is not a great actor and his accent is completely out of place in anything American. These initial feelings however did not prepare me properly for the travesty that was made of his role. The Juggernaut is depicted simply as a big bloke who runs through walls. The key aspects of his character - his connection to Charles Xavier and his power derived from a magic gem - are completely ignored. He joins Magneto's brotherhood for pretty much no reason and we are given only about two lines to explain who he is. Also the fact that he is not actually a mutant is scrapped to make way for a painfully predictable and anti-climactic defeat.
Other tragic cock-ups include the pointless inclusion of Angel who is only in the film for about two minutes. We find out nothing about him apart from that his dad is a politically involved man who believes mutants are a disease to be "cured". The only words to come out of Angel's mouth are hideous clichés.
And WHAT were the writers thinking when they decided to kill off Cyclops, Professor X and Jean Grey and render Mystique, Magneto and Rogue powerless?!? These were clearly devices designed to increase the excitement and emotional content but since the story lacked everything apart from bad dialogue and ill-conceived sequences of events I was left feeling wholly unfulfilled and with a strong desire for homicide. If I was allowed to swear here I would.
I can't write any more - to include all the details of how this film ruined the X-Men series; how it angers and saddens me that great stories are forever ruined by money-grabbing, talentless film makers; and how the sum total of the worth of the entire human race has been deeply discredited and shamed would take far more time than I have to spare.
I'll leave by saying that actually Kelsey Grammar was very good as Beast and I really quite enjoyed all of his scenes. Cheers :)