Not quite as bad as Fantastic Four, but...

Rating: 5/10 (1 August 2006)

This is not a good film.
I'm not going to beat around the bush. I don't like it. Because I'm thinking that it should be compared to the movies that came before it. And therein lies the problem. This film has a complete lack of emotional gravity or character development.
In the first films, we focused on a few main characters, Wolverine, Rogue, and a few others. Everyone got a few scenes where they developed, and there were arcs. Let me say that again: The characters went somewhere. Somewhere they couldn't have gotten in a half-hour episode of television.
In this film, they emphasize the plot more than the characters. But the screenplay is not good enough to support it, and the director makes no attempt to make up for it with exceptional deliveries. All the characters we fell in love with have been completely tossed by the wayside. In the first films, Wolverine was an amazing character, an anti-hero, who did awesome things with his claws, and was struggling to figure out his past. Now, granted, he seems to have figured out what happened to him in X2, but there was a life before the procedure, and in X- Men 3, he's somehow come to terms with his past, and the internal struggle is gone. He has no exciting sequences, and no character development.
I don't want to give any spoilers, but there are a more than a few characters who are set up for fantastic arcs and character developments, but these stories are forgotten and unfulfilled. That's the movie as a whole. It's set up for a great film, and the plot in itself has potential, but they do not collect on the potential.
Now, make no mistake: I have seen worse movies. Fantastic Four jumps to mind. Elektra and Hulk are up there. But this was one of the worse blockbusters of the summer, and didn't deserve to open the summer movies. This film could've used about another year of working on the screenplay, another month shooting, and another half of a year on the special effects. (They're aren't terrible special effects in the film, but the whole film is rushed.)
If you want to see a quality superhero movie, go rent X2. This film is nowhere near as good. It's one thing for a sequel to fall short, but this is ridiculous.