Kim Gentes

X-men Mutate to Final Stage

X-Men III: "The Last Stand" is a graphically powerful and purposefully driven story of the mutant children and their telepathic teacher, Charles Xavier. But the story is not so much driven by a fine plot as it is by the weight of numerous stories from the comic book series. In an apparent attempt to appease Stan Lee, X-Men III attempts to wrap several X-Men stories into a movie that incorporates many bits and pieces of X-men comic lore. The result is an overly detailed script that leaves far to much to the screen writers and nothing to the audience. While the special effects are impressive, the story drones on and on about mutant rights and political, governmental and societal injustice against them. Unless you are an X-men comic book fan, watching this film still leaves you wondering why all the regular humans would be so adamant on snuffing out the cool guys with all the powers.

The acting is fairly good, along with the effects, and plays an important part in holding the story together. But the movie relies too much on Hugh Jackman's Wolverine character and this ultimately leaves the film wanting for strong lead. Aside from some notably funny lines, Jackman resorts to the angry razor-knuckled freak to try to rage his way through every conflict. It works but only for a while. After a few confrontations, the audience starts to look for intelligence and interest. But what it gets is more and more mutant powers sprayed all over the screen to help make everything better.

Sad as that might be to any other film, it actually works here and the action ultimately is what this film is all about. One wishes the director would have recognized this earlier in the film, though, because much of it is spent building a plot of human interest (ok mutant interest), not super powered show off time. But the culmination ultimately feels contrived and personal connections of this film feel left out there to blow in the storm.

I liked the film, because it represented the powers of the characters well and fed some decent battle scenes. But I lament the loss of focus this movie has with deciding what it is about. It felt like a thoughtful, but drawn out thinking movie for the first 70 minutes. But for the last 30 minutes it goes bonkers with power mongering and special effects. One expects some of this from a comic book series, but it is very plausible as a good fiction movie.

Watching the "Last Stand" of X-men III was a bit like Jean Grey's character- a splintered division of various stories from the X-Men comic book story line. If you are an X-Men fan from the comic book days, you may be in for a complete revisit of the true Jean Grey story and destination of the Phoenix. In the original comic book series, Phoenix becomes so powerful; she is a godlike being able to resurrect herself from death. But in this movie, Jean Grey and her story line is much cohesive, presumably to help save the audience the untenable myriad of plots that can't be understood by anyone without mutant level intelligence (for more info on the real Jean Grey story/ aka comic books, see en. wikipedia. org/ wiki/ Jean_Grey [remove the spaces from that URL] ).

Of notable interest in this film is Ellen Page as Kitty Pride (Sprite for the X-followers), who does a nice job of developing a enjoyable and personal heroine. Kelsey Grammer does very well as Beast making the character real to me, even more so than the comics, and that was refreshing. Rebecca Romin also does very well as the Raven Darkholme / Mystique character, becoming interesting and surprisingly human.

You will find some good acting here, but it's a little hard to like it all. Overall, its a good action movie to fill up your violence dance card. But as a thoughtful film it fails. This would not normally be a problem for an action / superhero movie, but because this film tries to force itself into making social commentary for about 65% of its length, the fact that it never really develops more intellect through its conclusion is disappointing.

The film is not frightening and won't be a problem for children 10 or over, in my opinion. X-Men II suffers from some slight episodic doldrums as well, with everyone waiting around at the end hoping some eerie reference to a next movie might occur and well.... (I won't tell).

My recommendation- go see if it you like X-Men. Go see it if you like superhero movies. Its a fun, if not inconsistent ride into the mutant world. Still it is worth you money in the theatre.