Fast paced, decent action but terrible character development

Rating: 6/10 (25 June 2006)

X-Men: Last Stand is the third movie in the X-Men series and is supposed to tie up all the lose ends from the previous movies. While the pacing is fast and the action is decent, i can't help to think that a movie of this caliber is so short.
Many new characters are introduced and sadly they never received the screen time that they deserved, resulting in poorly developed characters of whom we as an audience know next to nothing about. An example of this would be Calisto and her group of mutants. Many of the characters introduced had great potential to make the movie more interesting but are wasted down to nothing but gimmicks, An example of this would include "Angel" "Multiple Man" "Juggernaut" "Spike".
While the concept of the story is interesting, it strives to do too many things at once and unfolds itself rather cumbersome. It mainly follows two main storyline that somewhat overlaps one another, one being about the cure and another being about Pheonix, now both stories have more than enough materials to be a movie on their own but if the length of this feature film would have been longer, it would have been more satisfactory.
The killing of key characters in the movies were done rather bland and poorly, inadvertently disrespecting the history of these characters as well as the build up from the previous movies. Now i know that its meant for a shock value, but if they're going to shock their audience, they could have added more tension to the scenes, so that we as an audience would care about what happens to these characters we all came to knew, instead of being in a state of wondering what the hell just happened.
Some of the fight scenes were disappointing to say the least, IceMan vs Pyro for example, is much too short to really be consider a duel, which is a shame because in the second movie the rivalry was built, and this is the payoff that we receive?
The Pheonix portrayed in the movie is underwhelming rather than overwhelming, at one point during the movie, she pouts like a child and even acted like one. Now i don't know exactly how Pheonix fans would take this but it just seemed ridiculous. Pheonix is used more like a prop set rather than an important character , most of her time was spent seeing her getting angry and powering up, standing still and letting the special FX take over, which is a shame because Famke Jannsen is a terrific actress who never really gets a chance to shine here.
I know the majority of this review has been deemed negative but there was some things that i appreciated in this movie that really surprised me. First off, The casting of Kelsey Grammar for Beast was ingenious! He embodied beast in every way (looks, sound, you name it). Ian McKellen as always, was an awesome Magneto who uses his powers in ways that you've never seen him do before (Truck scene, Goldengate bridge) Magneto even gave a convincing speech that made me want to join the brotherhood for once.
Overall the movie was quite entertaining and there was never really a dull moment, which to me is a major plus.