Funny thing- I was actually pretty entertained the first time I saw X-Men 3, mostly because the movie is so loud (so VERY loud in the theatre I watched it in!), fast and stupid that I scarcely had time to think about the ridiculousness of the proceedings while I was watching it. Even so, I left the theatre with a bad taste in my mouth because of something the X-Men did near the end of the movie- a morally questionable act toward one of their enemies that none of them had the slightest qualm about. Something so completely out-of-character for all of them that I couldn't believe a fan of the comic books had written the script.
The movie is full of moments like that. The more I thought about them after the movie, the more I didn't like it. By the second time I watched it, I outright hated it.
It's not director Brett Ratner's fault. The opening scene with younger versions of Magneto and Professor X (complete with the much-vaunted de-aged versions of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart) meeting an adolescent Jean Grey is very well done indeed. So is the rather harrowing follow-up scene with a young Angel. Clearly, Mr. Ratner can do a good job if he sets his mind to it. No, what really lets the movie down is its script. The premise was awkward from the start- both the Cure and the Phoenix storylines could each be a movie by themselves. Stuffing them both into the same movie was just a terrible idea as it's impossible to do them both justice at the same time. One of them had to get short shrift- sadly, it was the Phoenix story that suffered here.
That's not the end of it, either. For such a short movie (it's barely over one and a half hours long), it has way too many extraneous characters. What's Beast doing here (looking terrible, despite what Halle Barry as Storm might say)? Or Angel, for that matter? A character important enough to be introduced in a pre-title sequence should not get all of 5 lines in the movie! Oddly enough, with the sheer amount of useless mutants in the film (like, every single mutant in Magneto's army- none of whom he needs because they all get massacred by US Army troops and the X-Men, after which he ends up fighting the good fight with just Pyro at his side anyway), they forgot to bring back the coolest mutant of all (at least in these movie versions)- Nightcrawler. They don't even refer to him in the movie.
Now
that's lazy script-writing. Bah. One of many examples you can find in this mess of a movie. Eventhough I followed the debacle of this movie's production online, via sites like
Aint It Cool News, so I knew it'd probably turn out as bad as it did, but somehow I went in hoping it wouldn't be a pile of crap. So much for that.
That being said, people who aren't big fans of the series are likely to enjoy themselves- this is very much a summer movie- big, loud and stupid, like I said at the start. The Armageddon of comic book movies, if you will. But as someone who really loved the first two X-Men movies (especially the second one), I was just incredibly disappointed- especially as it looks like this is the last real X-Men film we're going to get. Way to end a series, people.
