X-Men 3 is one of those films that makes a superb trailer; lots of stunning special effects, witty one-liners and big loud noises, and all in 60 easy to digest seconds. An Oscar winning trailer, you could say. Cracks usually start to appear when an hour and half long film with a proper story and narration, characters and believable dialogue has to be constructed. You run the risk of producing a film that is little more than a collection of computer created action scenes thrown together with just a vague link connecting them and that is unfortunately the fate that befalls the ‘Last Stand’.
In the last of the X-Men trilogy, a cure for the mutant X-Men to turn them into plain old boring homo sapiens has been invented by a pharmecutical company but is now being used by the Government as a way of controlling them. Split by opinion on how to deal with this threat to their status, divisions begin to appear between the mutants. The mostly peaceful side who believe in communication and co-operation with the Government and even have a representative in a gigantic blue Kelsey Grammar as Hank McCoy, are led by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and form the X-Men. The radicals, who have just as much beef with the X-Men as they do with the Government, are lead by a fantastically menacing Ian McKellen as Magneto. It culminates, as these things often do, with a huge battle at the end of the movie for the much sought after powers of the extra special Phoenix, once an X-Woman but now a danger to the entire planet due to her uncontrollable cosmic powers.
Sounds great, I hear you say! Although the synopsis sounds simple enough, the path to the end of the film is a treachorous one and the story has gaps big enough to enable you to drive an Eddie Stobart lorry through it. The resurrection of the previously expired Phoenix could not even be explained by the characters themselves and left out of the film until the finish in the hope that everyone will have just forgotten about it by the end. Characters are introduced and then killed off just as quickly for no apparent reason. A young boy, at odds with the giant wings that have sprouted out of his back, is shown at the start of the film cutting them off as if this provides the viewer a cryptic clue to the finale to the film, but he plays just a peripheral role. Most of the large range of characters that currently adorn our buses and advertisement boards promoting the film only star in the film for a number of minutes, including Vinnie Jones who is superby cast as a fat-headed lump who runs through walls as his special talent.
As for the much talked about CGI sequences, they’re really nothing we haven’t seen before. Since the ability to impress movie-goers with the aid of computers has come about we’ve been left with too many identikit movies where the action set-pieces hardly seem to vary and due to the lack of time spent developing any of the characters, the viewer is left bored by Wolverine taking lumps out of bad-guys or Storm spinning around really quickly in the air.
It seems that Brett Ratner was allowed to get his filthy hands on X-Men 3 because Bryan Singer, who directed the previous two movies with varied success, was busy finishing the new Superman film. They should have just waited.
