Not even visually adequate

Rating: 5/10 (30 May 2006)

First of all I'm not a fan of the comics or the first 2 films. The first two installments were OK movies, and I didn't have great expectations when I sat down to watch The Last Stand. I wanted to see a coherent story with decent characters and enjoyable action. This movie fails on all three levels (plot, characters and action)
The movie opens with a pointless scene. 20 years ago Xavier and Magneto recruited Jean Grey, but we knew that from the previous movie, the scene adds nothing new, while this third movie's main subject, is the Phoenix, which lives in her. At least they could have been throw in some foreshadowing or something, but no...
The Phoenix is an entity which is evil, and we don't know what it's capable of besides killing anybody who it comes in contact with. This is the fate of Cyclops, one of the coolest characters in the movies. His death occurs off-screen, and at the time, we have no clue, why Jean killed him. Later, we find out, that Xavier manipulated Jean's mind, and the Phoenix woke up... But we still don't know what it is exactly.
And this subplot goes on and on, we hear the name of the Phoenix numerous times, but we never really get to know, who the hell it is and what does it want. These are the obvious signs of weak storytelling.
Let's see an another subplot, the subplot of the "cure". This is some kind of chemical, which makes mutants ordinary people. The cure is in a 8 year old boy's DNA, and many people are guarding him. This situation allows the writers many possibilities to introduce interesting subplots about mutants, who see themselves as sick ordinary people and they want to be cured, and some other mutants, who want to be mutants even though there is a "cure". Yet, we don't see anything like that, just mindless shouting crowds and of course, a villain, who wants to kill or capture the boy and kill everyone who was involved in creating the cure. The emotional, philosophical and moral depth wasn't discovered in the plot. They tried it in Rogue's case, but there's nothing special in her subplot. She decides to embrace the cure and become "normal". And that's it. Nothing more. Moral dilemma before the choice? No. Just a weak attempt on Storm's side: she utters a whole sentence along the lines of "There's no need to heal". One sentence. Clever writing indeed...
My main complaint about this movie is that the characters doesn't do anything. Let's see a few of them: Storm flies into the air a couple of times and inherits Xavier's leading role after his death. But she's not able to do it convincingly.
Rogue just wants to be a human being, who can freely touch anybody. And she gets what she wanted. That's it.
Colossus is totally pointless, he throws Wolverine twice into the air and that's it. That's freakin' it...
Mystique at least pulled off a few jokes. She was funny, and when she got shot with the cure, Magneto left her alone. It was about the only character-development kinda thing in the movie.
Magneto tries to get hold of Phoenix (he succeeds), and tries to capture the boy (fails), and nothing more. Oh, he says "What have I done?" for no particular reason at the end of the movie. He killed so many people before, and when Phoenix is doing that, all of a sudden he is in shock? Ridiculous...
The Phoenix stands on the ground, and creates a great whirlwind, kills a lot of people, just because it looks cool. We don't have the slightest idea what's going on, then Wolverine manages to kill it. And with it, he kills Jean Grey also. Bad luck. We can't feel sorry for him, because we don't know, who Jean Grey was. She was given about 4 minutes of screen time. And in half of it, she wasn't even herself, but Phoenix...
I could go on and on, but I won't. The character-development is nonexistent in X-Men 3, and the action is mindless and ridiculous, but at times manages to be entertaining. And there was one character I could care about, and it was Kitty Pride, but she also became a victim of the writers of the movie: she didn't have enough screen time to trimly develop her character.
All in all it's not a bad movie, but not good either. Watch it if you want to see the special effects extravaganza at the end, which involves the flying Golden Gate Bridge (ridiculous, but nonetheless entertaining), many explosions, flying and burning cars, flying people, and Storm performing electroshock on an evil mutant. The only decent action sequence was when Juggernaut was chasing Kitty Pride. At least some clever ideas instead of "blow the whole world around the fighting characters, because it looks cool" attitude.
X-Men: The Last Stand is a good watch with friends in the theatre, but don't expect anything groundbreaking or remarkable.
5/10