big, actiony, and shallow

Rating: 5/10 (28 May 2006)

Overall, the movie was mildly entertaining. But nothing compared to the first or second one (probably because the original crew, including the director, and director of photography, didn't have anything to do with it). Which is too bad, because I was looking forward to new displays of power, cool fight scenes, more of the interesting character stories,new suspenseful situations, etc. Instead, I saw a high-budget generic action movie with lots of explosions and one-liners meant for cheap easy laughs with occasional moments of teen drama spliced in. There were a couple of fairly moving scenes (that I can't talk about without spoiling it) and Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart all did a great job in it (as usual), but I came away with the distinct feeling that the people who made this film didn't really love and understand X-Men the same way Bryan Singer did. They just wanted a simple way to amuse a crowd for 2 hours. If you liked the first two, you should see this one, at least for the sake of satisfying curiosity, because it's not all terrible. But it's definitely one those sequels that I will try to forget exists when I watch the other movies in the series.