(Originally posted December 10th, 2017)
Ever since I watched Batman Returns a few days ago, there's been a big streak of excellent films. That's why I was cautious about X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), as I'd heard bad things about it. Having seen the movie, I'm not sure what people were complaining about. It's definitely not as good as the other X-Men movies, but it's not bad. I'd even say that it's pretty good. Starring Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine, Halle Berry as Ororo Munroe/Storm, Ian McKellan as Eric Lehnsherr/Magneto, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey/Phoenix, Kelsey Grammar as Hank McCoy/Beast, Shawn Ashmore as Bobby Drake/Iceman and Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier/Professor X.
The most obvious change about this movie is its runtime. It barely comes in at 90 minutes, excluding credits. When I first noticed this, I was a little shocked, as the pace of the movie up to that point had been that of a 2 hour movie. And that's one of the issues of this movie. It's starts incredibly slow, then picks up toward the middle, then goes at about a million miles an hour by the end. It can get a little jarring at times, especially with the amount of stories the movie attempts to juggle. Because there's a lot of them. The movie felt like it really should have been that extra 30 minutes long if it wanted to include so many subplots. As is stands, a lot of plot threads in the movie either go nowhere, start then stop, or suffer an incredibly rushed resolution. They either should have cut some subplots, or lengthened the movie to accommodate them. Doing either of those things would have fixed a lot of the problems I had with the film.
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| Rebecca Robijn as Raven Darkholme |
The fact that there were so many subplots is something I do need to address again, because it is important. Anna Paquin, who plays Rogue, was technically in the movie, but I didn't feel the need to bring her up because she gets literally 5 minutes, if that, of screentime, and her arc is very disappointing. As someone who loved her in the first movie, this was a huge betrayal. Or, at the very least, if they were going to go down this road, they should have given her more screen-time so her journey was justified. Another of my favourites who got shafted was James Marsden as Scott Summers/Cyclops. You may know that Cyclops is one of my favourite X-Men, though that's more for the 'Wolverine and the X-Men' TV show. So, to see him go out like that in the first 20 minutes was a huge let-down, especially because I was really looking forward to seeing where his character went after X2. With a few re-writes, he could have gone out during that final action scene, and that would have been so much more appropriate.
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| Anna Paquin as Rogue |
There are also quite a few new additions to the cast, which might account for why so many returning characters were pushed aside. Unfortunately, we don't really get a lot of time to get to know them before the movie needed us to be invested in them. There was Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut, Ben Foster as Angel, Dania Ramirez as Callisto, Cameron Bright as Leech, Eric Dane as Multiple Man and Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde, and by the way, I don't think I even heard Kitty's name in the entire movie. The only new character to really get the deluxe treatment here was Kelsey Grammar as Beast. I'm not sure if it was Kelsey Grammar's amazing acting, or the fact that McCoy just got more screen-time, but I really found myself attached to this character by the end. I didn't even recognise Kelsey Grammar in this role until I looked it up, and that's a very identifiable voice. That scene with him and Leech was so powerful, and it was one of the strongest moments in all 3 X-Men films I've seen.
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| Kelsey Grammar as Hank McCoy |
The one thing that really made this film stand apart were its fight scenes. My God, these were so entertaining. The film took advantage of the fact that there were so many mutants with so many different abilities, and it just showed them all. There were so many unique set pieces in this piece: the floating house, the final battle on Alcatraz, even the opening fight scene showing a simulation of the human/mutant war was a treat to watch. And, you've got to give the movie this: they found a way to use the Golden Gate Bridge without completely destroying it. When that scene on the bridge began, I actually rolled my eyes and said something along the lines of "Well, here we go, the obligatory destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge", but by the end of the scene, I was gobsmacked. The climax in particular, I felt, really stood-out against its predecessors, primarily due to the build-up and slow inclusion of more and more mutants as the series went on. This was the time to throw everything into it, and it was extremely entertaining.
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| Ian McKellan as Magneto |
All in all, X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) was a surprisingly fun time all things considered. I'm not sure if I was just impressed because I went in expecting the worst, but I'm convinced my opinions are purely based on the movie itself. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I'm missing something obvious, such as a massive plothole, or something, that makes this film so terrible to you, but in my eyes, this was an entertaining end to a fantastic trilogy, and I'd happily watch all 3 again. 7.5/10
Tomorrow: it's Batman Forever.
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