Left An Ugly Taste In My Mouth

Rating: 4/10 (14 September 2010)

X-Men: The Last Stand left an ugly taste in my mouth by its close. I was so in love with the previous two movies, but then this one failed to do what the first two succeeded so brilliantly at doing. First of all, the characters in Last Stand were not balanced well at all. The way the characters were balanced was what was so impressive about the first film, but that seems to have been, unfortunately, abandoned. I kept wanting more out of these characters, and I wasn't getting that.
***Warning: Here There Be Spoilers*** I also want to take a minute to talk about the way the deaths of some of the characters were handled. It wasn't so much that they died but where their deaths were placed in the story. Cyclops is killed off entirely too early, before the audience even has a chance to become acquainted with the pains he has been feeling. Yes, character developments have finally taken a backseat to action and effects in the X-Men movies. But I also disliked entirely what they did to Rogue. By the end of the film, she has given up her powers. I thought one of the most interesting stories of the last two films was Rogue's and the way she had to try to have a relationship with Iceman when she couldn't touch him. But instead of working out this problem, the writers take the easy way out and give her the Cure instead. Rogue was one of my favorite characters, but Last Stand turned her into something I did not like. ***
As for the rest of the characters in this movie, I think the writers (Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn) tried too hard to balance too many characters. And they don't. Characters sporadically enter the movie and drop out, we're given no time with any of them, and the film doesn't even try to keep their story lines straight. For instance, there was a very interesting character known as Angel with wings growing out of his back. He appears in the beginning of the film, once briefly in the middle, and once even more briefly at the end. I wanted more time with this character. I wanted to learn something about him. No luck. And there was a lot of that going on.
As for the main villains, our "Class 5" mutant is entirely too powerful. She can lift a house and rip people apart. She can nearly destroy an entire island. Why was there even that final battle? She could have obliterated all of the opposing mutants like they were nothing. This was a very unnecessary addition to the movie that just left the film with an overabundance of plot holes. And there is no focus to this story. None of the characters are given the attention they deserve, and there were some fairly interesting characters in this film, including Beast.
As for the final battle, I was disappointed. There was not a lot of intelligence put into the battle; instead it was full of more explosions than anything else. I didn't think Brett Ratner did the mutants justice with the battle. The one scene that shows that best was the battle between Pyro and Iceman. I was really excited to see this battle. We had seen plenty of evidence of the great power exhibited by both mutants already, and I knew that it would be epic. It wasn't. Ratner did not take this battle *nearly* as far as he could have. It could have been great! But instead, the two mutants just have a brief tug-of-war type fight and then it's over.
The screenplay was the biggest problem with The Last Stand, but Brett Ratner did not do his job either. It's sad because I have liked three of Ratner's other movies and I expected good from him here. I had seen him do some great work in the first two Rush Hour movies and Red Dragon, but his direction style is disappointingly dull in The Last Stand. I expected more out of him. I didn't get it.
I wasn't even all that impressed with the special effects in this film. I thought they were wonderful in the first two movies, but all special effects after 2003 look entirely too CGI, and The Last Stand is no exception.
I was disappointed and disheartened by The Last Stand. I was left wanting more out of the X-Men series rather gaining any satisfaction from it. I want to see an X-Men 4 with Bryan Singer back as a screenwriter and director because I want some great character work done again. X-Men: The Last Stand was not the kind of X-Men movie I wanted.
4/10