Blog From The Bench

When is a spectacle not very special, an epic rather anemic? When it’s the final film in the so-so serialization of the X-Men comics onto the silver screen. Fans foamed when they learned that their beloved Bryan Singer wouldn’t be helming this final installment in the seemingly stalled franchise, but they really needn’t have worried. Not even their much admired moviemaker could have saved this script. Someone in Fox’s story department must have decided that the first two films were just too packed with context, and jettisoned most of the political and social significance from the storyline. Then they filled in the gaps with mutants - more and more mutants. Frankly, the desire to overload the narrative with new faces is just one of several cinematic missteps X-Men: The Last Stand makes (and, in all honestly, a flaw flowing through all three films). No, all new director Brett Ratner brings to the mix is a level of superficiality that a concept as complex as this can’t possibly survive on.

Dealing with the influx of newbies for a moment, only Kelsey Grammar seems convinced he is in a storyline of substance. His Beast, woefully underdeveloped and underrepresented, cuts an intriguing swath in the scenes he is in. But we don’t learn enough about him, his motives and his mindset, to welcome him wholly into the X-Men fold. He often feels like a hold-over from a different film. Then there are Magneto’s new companions. Pyro, otherwise known as the snot-nosed irritant Aaron Stanford, is like that know-it-all asshole who sat behind you in Math class, answering every question correctly as he incessantly kicked the back of your seat. He needs a beat down, big time, along with a huge cup of bad boy comeuppance. While this may all be a compliment to Mr. Stanford’s performance, I for one wished he would choke on his own conflagration and DIE!. As for the rest of the bad guys, they look like they dropped out of a primitive performance art version of Rent. Their tattooed and pierced personages look like throwbacks to a Goth jam band festival, not a futuristic force of evil. And poor Vinnie Jones, reduced to playing a boulder with a British accent. How the mighty have fallen.

(And could someone tell me why the critical community is so cow-eyed over Ellen Page’s good girl Kitty Pride. So she passes through walls. Big friggin’ deal. I killed a gopher once with a stick.)

But the main problem with the film, one that keeps it from reaching the highest elevations of popcorn entertainment, is its lack of real emotional resonance. Several MAJOR characters bite the big one in this film - on both sides of the ethical equation - and yet there is not a single second where these deaths/transformations have a viable, visceral impact. When Jean Gray returns from her watery grave, it’s a CGI sequence out of the lake-bound version of The Perfect Storm. When another important player disintegrates into a thousand shards of essence, it’s supposed to be a heart-wrenching end for an iconic figure. But the sentiment is stillborn, falling flat within the whirlwind Ratner is constantly creating. The action set pieces all suffer from this sense of the staged. The final standoff between man and mutant, occurring in one of the most illogical locales in all of filmdom, delivers none of the thrilling satisfaction we expect from such cinematic fireworks. We want to be wowed and awe-struck. Instead, we are struck with how ordinary it all is.

Granted, the movie is mildly entertaining, never truly curling up and turning into the corrupt cowflop the fans had feared (though that doesn’t seem to be the case for the truly devoted. Apparently, this movie bites bug butt from their graphic novel perspective), and in Jean Gray’s angry alter ego The Phoenix, Famke Jassen has finally found a role to fit her arch androgyny. Why Wolverine and Cyclops go ga-ga over her rather masculine mannerisms is one of the trilogy’s biggest mysteries. Hugh Jackman makes the impossible-to-kill triple blade boy a sure symbol of half-baked heroism. It will be interesting to see how the planned spin-off for his manmade mutant character comes off. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart trade Old Vic volleys - and age defying make-up work as part of a pre-credits flashback - and Ratner does indeed keep the franchise’s future afloat without doing any real damage. No, the desire to rush out another X-Men movie before the storyline was secure is why the third times not quite the charm. Instead, we have a perfunctory piece of summer film fluff that ends this cinematic phase of the X-Men with a decided whimper, not the big badass bang everyone had hoped for.

5 out of 10

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