Quarto said:
Hmmm.
Well, it wasn't that bad, I guess, but it was definitely pretty bad compared to X2 (which in turn wasn't anywhere near as good as X1).
X-Men: The Last Stand suffered from much the same problem as the original
X-Men: it simply wasn't long enough to give its plotlines time to breathe.
What I utterly hated, was those idiotic goths. Ugh! We're bad mutants, so we cover ourselves with tattoos and wear black clothers? What hell was about? Goths are the single stupidest-looking sub-culture in the world. What kind of an idiot do you have to be as a director, to make the choice of having the arch-villain's "army" dressed up as a bunch of emotionally-insecure teenagers?
Unfortunately, writers Penn and Kinberg felt it was more important to showcase various mutants and their powers rather than convey story and character. Did we need to see Random Mutant Girl #11 writing in her notebook by force of mind? No. Ratner, Penn and Kinberg thought we did, though.
For me, one of the highlights of the movie was actually seeing all those idiot goths getting torn to shreds. That was fun. Seriously, Magneto's forces seemed a hundred times more dangerous when it was just Mystique, Sabretooth and Toad. Three well-developed and well-designed characters are always a better choice than three hundred generic goths. But then again, could anything be worse than goths?
Sadly, the goths (Callisto, Psylocke and some other random mutant) were a complete waste of time. Callisto's two fights with Storm? Terribly planned and indeed worthless to the movie.
Also, Pheonix. Good grief, that sucked. Her role in this movie could be summed up as: stand there/kill/stand there/kill/stand there/kill/stand there/kill/die. Wow! What an extraordinary character. What amazing character development. And what an amazing costume - I'll take the yellow spandex, thank you very much... especially if it's worn by an actual character instead of an ultra-powerful statue.
I've never read an
X-Men comic in my life, but from what I could tell, Jean Grey/Phoenix was terribly underused. This is a character that was built up as a Class 5 mutant (in the movie's terms) and as an uncontrollable, unstoppable force -- at the end of the hour and 45 minutes, though, Phoenix had done precisely three things: kill Cyclops, kill Xavier, and allow Wolverine to kill
her. Outside of a ginormous
The Day After Tomorrow-like wave, there was nothing to pay off the build-up for Phoenix. And that's symptomatic of the script. This story easily needed another half-hour to breathe and really develop.
Finally, there was simply way too many characters in this movie, and way too much happening. As a consequence, a lot of the main characters from the previous movies didn't get the screen time they deserved. I can't understand why Cyclops would have a grand total of five minutes on-screen while Bobby and Kitty(who were mere cameos in the first movie, for crying out loud!) would get an hour. I can't understand why Rogue got so little screen time, too. Heck - if I hadn't seen the first two movies, I wouldn't understand what was up with her. I wouldn't even know what her power was, and why she so desperately wanted to get rid of it. And why was Angel on the movie poster anyway? He's so insignificant, nobody would've even noticed had all the scenes with him been cut.
It's a problem that began with
X2: X-Men United, in that there was simply too little time to devote to all the characters. In
X2, Cyclops, Pyro, Jean Grey and Magneto were given precious little screen time, and while fans of those characters suffered, the movie succeeded on a whole.
X2's story did not need the significant involvement of Cyclops by any means.
...On the bright side, at least Wolverine and Magneto were still there.
McKellen was one of the primary bright spots of
X-Men: The Last Stand, at least according to the review I wrote for two area newspapers. While the plot was weak and the character development nearly nonexistent, I was sold on one single McKellen line: "Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you'll ever know."