X-Men: The Last Stand

The story mainly revolves around the 'cure' for mutants. A man named Warren Worthington II has managed to develope a serum for mutants to lose their powers and become normal humans again. Professor X tries to talk his way to prevent cure from going out but Magneto is going to stop it at all costs. In X2, Jean Grey had died in order to save the X-Men. She was resurrected as the Dark Phoenix in X3. But this time, she is not sure who she is and she has to decide to follow Professor X or Magneto.

My favourite comic-book-to-movie character of all time. Don't know why.

What Do I Think?

Part of the reason that we are able to see X-Men 3 (I'm going to call it X-Men 3! What is this thing going on that they are not using numbers for sequels anymore??) was because X-Men was successful. Director Bryan singer was able to use minimal CGI and good human interaction to make it a worthy comic to film translation. Now, this guy has gone to make another superhero film, you know the one with the red cape and flies, and bringing along the two writers for X1 and X2. In replacement, we get that Rush Hour director, Brett Ratner. Ratner was not bad on X3, but I still yearn for Singer after watching the movie.

X1 and X2 were brilliant in the sense that the story was able to show you how the team was able to coordinate their special powers to fight the bad guys. In X3, you won't get to see much of that. Mostly the X-Men were very individual during their fights. Now that the budget is much higher than of X1, Ratner is able to play around more with special effects. I could visualise that Singer would use less of that but more intelligent dialogues instead.

While Singer has left very high rewatchability values on X1 and X2, I must commend that Ratner did a very good job to commercialise this outing. The special effects were well and appropriately used to further enhance the comic books 'feel' on the big screen. Many critics complained that there were too many mutants in the movie. That too little attention were given to them and some of them had no character development at all. There were too many 'cheapskate' mutants - Callisto? Arclight? Who the heck are they? I personally feel that it was right to have so many mutants around. After all it's the X-Men universe, where the world is divided between humans and mutants. Nevermind that recognition is not given due to them, in the comic books, there were that many mutants around!

Weaknesses and strengths aside, I was very disappointed with the contents of the storyline. I won't tell you what happens but the events could cause X4 to be impossible. I wish they would not have happened in order to preserve the continuity.

And one last complaint. There were too many usages of this sort of dialogue:
#1
Professor X to Jean: Will you control it, or let it control you?
#2
Angel's father: This is what we all want!
Angel: No, this is what YOU want!
#3
Wolvie: They're ready.
Storm: Yeah, I know. But are YOU ready?
#4
Jean: You are going to die for them?
Wolvie: No, not for them. For you!
#5
Ice-man: This is not what I wanted...
Rogue: But this is what I wanted.

Yikes. I'm not sure if there were more but these five were enough to kill the premise of having intelligent scripts. Once is clever but five times?

Rating:
6/10. If there were no X-Men 1 and 2, then my rating is: 8/10

Notes:

Do stay back to watch after the credits end. There's a very important scene you must not miss... a certain revelation that could lead to... X-Men 4?