Hopefully Not The Last Stand

Rating: 8/10 (7 June 2006)

First off, Kitty Pryde's in this one! She's my favorite since I was a kid, and she finally gets an opportunity to shine that she didn't get in the first two films. In the first two films they teased us by showing Kitty Pryde in cameo appearances. I only wish Bryan Singer had insisted she be more a focus of the films - Kudos to Ratner for doing what Singer didn't. Kitty Pryde IS the X-Men for me, more so than Wolverine or Storm or even Professor X. I was glad to finally get to see her before the trilogy was done.
How can a motion picture production company take forty plus years of fictional history and distill it into three films? Best you can do is scour through the source material, try to figure out what makes the material so darn good in the first place, and pull out the highlights, then remix the best parts into a new creation. You won't get it right, but maybe if you're lucky you'll get it close. The X-Men trilogy gets it VERY close. The trick is to try and whet the appetites of newcomers to the source material, as well as appease the people who have come to expect a certain something from the Marvel-owned meme: "X-Men." I think this film achieves that admirably.
Could it have been better? In terms of dialog and storyline, certainly. What made me shake my head as I watched it was when Magneto takes the San Francisco Bridge and utterly destroys it in order to use it as a transport for his little army in order to get to Alcatraz. Half the people in his army could fly. They coulda just picked up the other half. It was wasteful. They just did it to show off the special effects necessary for destroying a whole bridge and floating it for five minutes on the screen while Ian McKellen hams it up. But hey. It LOOKS great! And Ian McKellen can ham it up like no one can with the possible exception of Peter O'Toole. The special effects in this film are tremendous eye candy, and it's just fun watching a dozen or so amazingly talented actors and actresses chew the scenery and their costumes and the green-screens they faced in order to do more with less. They won't get Oscars for making this believable, but perhaps they should, for it's a tall order. One of the many problems this genre of film making has suffered over the years is the difficulty in making the fantasy of modern vigilantism with extraordinary humans endowed with godlike powers even remotely realistic. This series of films, and The Last Stand in particular, have taken the themes of X-Men and drove them home in a way that's reverent to the source material and perhaps a bit preachy, but not without its bells and whistles and things exploding.
Here's hoping the franchise will now branch out after this trilogy, and allow the production company to focus more in the future on solo films for each major character that give each character a chance to be more than the occasional one-liner. Oh, and I don't know about you but I've had enough of Wolverine. As much as I like the character, there's more to X-Men than him.