Third time's not the charm

Rating: 6/10 (15 April 2018)

First let's get some good things said about this movie -- because there are a few. Best for my money is that we get a first good look at Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde, played by Ellen Page) and her abilities, after just cameo appearances in the first two X-Men films.. She's a delight. Her extended scene at Worthington Labs running right through walls ("phasing" as it's called in the actual comics) while being chased by the thuggish Juggernaut, who smashes through them, is a highlight of the film, including the way she cleverly turns the tables on him. Another very nice scene is Storm's (Halle Berry) eulogy for Professor X (Patrick Stewart) on the sunlit schoolgrounds while surrounded by all the mutant pupils. It's nicely scripted, and it works. It was also rather fun to have Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammar) around in one of the bigger roles, and he gives it some real stature.
Going beyond that, it's hard to know where to start. Bryan Singer, the canny director for the first two X-films, had the right touch for this unique franchise in the superhero genre, but the shift to Brett Ratner turned out to be a big step down.
(1) Far and away the worst is what was done to Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). As we all expected after the end of the superb X2, she is resurrected as the ultra-powerful Phoenix -- but when using her power, instead of being surrounded by the beautiful "bird of fire" CGI effect that we got a nice glimpse of in X2, here Jean turns into something like a sunburned witch -- no firebird at all. WTF?? Whose idea was that?? and for someone who was supposedly going to be the centerpiece of the plot, she spends a lot of time offscreen, as if the (male) writers and director just couldn't think of much to do with her. Instead, lots of screen time spent is spent with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who became the face of the franchise after his breakout success in the first X-Men. Not necessarily a bad thing, but mostly he's just going through the motions.
(2) Trite, boring dialog. Magneto (Ian McKellen), who had quite a presence in X1 and X2 and conveyed a real sense of menace, is reduced to stock villainous rants that he was probably embarrassed to deliver. This sort of lazy scripting affects almost everyone's parts but it reaches bottom with him. What's almost as bad is that two of the mainstay characters, Storm and Xavier, seemingly out of nowhere are harder-edged, almost antiheros in what they do. That may be fine for Wolverine but not for them. There are plenty of villains here to go around without conscripting characters who ought to be heros.
(3) And the ambience -- what had a clear, upbeat, attractive feel in the first two films is here turned into flat, ugly settings and tone. Most of the time it's just not very fun to look at. What a waste.
(4) Plot and character are sacrificed for rather mindless smash-'em-up action. There's too much of it, it's not well thought out, and it's a mark of lazy moviemaking.
Lastly, though this is just a minor annoyance compared with the major issues in this movie, for the third time in a row we see the Professor shuffled off to the sidelines for most of the movie. In X-Men, he's sent into a coma when Cerebro is sabotaged. In X2, he's mind-controlled into a fantasy world by Stryker's mutant son. And here in X3, he's seemingly killed off by Jean herself before any of the main action gets going. Again, this is lazy scripting -- there's so much more the Professor could do in a more thoughtfully worked out story.
On the IMdB user ratings I see that women rate this one higher than men (7.1 vs 6.7), and in all age groups. There are plenty of votes so I think it's statistically significant. I'm not sure why -- for X1 and X2 the male/female ratings were quite similar.
The rather poor effort of X3 coming after the successes of its two predecessors, sadly brought the X-Men franchise to a temporary halt till it was rebooted several years later with a new historical/origins approach in X-Men First Class (2011). That one had its issues too, but it got the franchise back on track. Now they're ready to try the Phoenix storyline again with Dark Phoenix in 2019. Fingers crossed. I see at least that they'll use the 'firebird' effect that we already saw from the young Jean at the climax of X-Men Apocalypse (2016).