Better Than Batman & Robin!

Well, here it is. Today is 6-6-6. If my bible knowledge is correct, this is the day that Gozer the Destructor takes corporeal form and reigns fire and death upon mankind. In what little time we have left, I guess it would only be fitting to talk about a certain movie that came out recently; a movie that is as good a sign as any that the end of days are near. An omen. I'm referring, of course, to X-Men III: The Last Stand.

Number of the Beast

Alright, it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good, either, and that's the problem. I'm not sure how it's possible, but you could actually hear the collective moan of the internet when it was announced that Brett Ratner would be helming this installment. I enjoyed the Rush Hour movies, so I thought all the negativity was a bit premature, and I reserved my judgment until after I'd seen the movie.

And now that I have seen it, my first reaction was "Man, Brett Ratner must really hate Cyclops." The poor guy's on-screen for less then two minutes, all of which he spends crying, before getting sucked into oblivion as the flim's first casualty. Maybe that last sentence should have been preceded by a spoiler warning. Okay, if you don't want to spoil the movie, hit yourself on the head repeatedly until you forget what you just read. That should do it.

Anyway, the movie starts with a brief flashback to twenty years ago, to Jean Grey's first meeting with the Professor and Magneto (who were all chummy back in the 80s). then the movie flashes to present day, or rather, the "near future," making it unclear if the flashback we just saw was twenty years ago in real time (1986), or twenty years before whenever the near future is. The near future could be next week, or several years from now. It's all pretty vague. Well, some time in the near future, Cyclops, aka Scott Summers, is riding his motorcycle, the pinnacle of masculinity, out to the lake (where Jean died in the last movie), while very un-masculinely sobbing uncontrollably. As he's weeping and yelling, Jean appears. They embrace, and she says she can fix his heat vision so it can be controlled. Then she kills him. No more Cyclops. Seriously. He doesn't even get a funeral, or even a headstone, until the very end where it's almost thrown in with the rest of the movie's casualties as an afterthought. Oh, hey, Scott's dead, too. I guess we should give the whiny bastard a headstone. The fact that they never mentioned him again made me think that he'd be alive and return at the end of the movie, but nope. He's really dead.

I've never read the comics; all I knew of the X-Men outside of the previous two movies was the cartoon that used to be on Fox. And I'm pretty sure Cyclops was the leader of the X-Men on that show. Maybe in the comic mythology Jean, who's now "Dark Phoenix," kills Scott. But it seems like even if that were the case, the movie could have handled it a bit better. No one even mentions him for the rest of the movie, except for Wolverine, who casually mentions that Scott's dead. Way to respect the team leader, guys.

If Ratner hated Cyclops, then he had a mild distaste for Mystique, who avoids getting whacked, but loses her mutant abilities and reverts to simply being a hot naked chick nearly as early into the movie as Cyclops' demise. She was injected with "the cure," the new chemical extracted from a young mutant boy that can turn mutants into regular humans. The cure serves as the plot for the movie, as factions of mutants split about what to think of this "cure". While most of the characters are opposed to the cure, especially Magneto and his followers, a few, such as Rogue, who can't touch anyone without killing them, are lining up for it.

Meanwhile Jean, who has emerged as one of the most powerful mutants on Earth, teams up with Magneto to wage war on the humans who wish to destroy their abilities. Just in case we didn't catch on that she was Dark Phoenix, there's a particularly morbid scene where she vaporizes Xavier. Naturally, he gets a funeral scene, with somber music and everything.

Between the demutation guns and the awesome destructive force of Dark Phoenix, half the mutants in the movie are either turned into average Joe's or zapped into dust by the third act. And with the professor, Cyclops and Jean gone, it's time for some of the young blood of the X-Men team to step up to the plate, right? Well, that would have been nice, but instead we get a promising fight showcasing Colossus (who had a bit part in X-Men II) and perennial background character Kitty Pryde battling Sentinels that turns out to be a Danger Room simulation. Any hopes that they'd play a role of any significance in this movie are slowly drowned as the story progresses, and it's clear that the we should be happy we even got the Danger Room scene. With the previous movies' love-triangle angle literally vaporized, Kitty does serve as a potential new love interest for Iceman, who's getting frustrated that he can't so much as touch Rogue. They don't see much time on the battlefront, though, and Rogue doesn't join them at all this time around.

So that leaves the new characters. Beast, who I don't actually recall ever being referred to as such in the movie, and Angel. Both members of the original group of X-Men when the comic launched, but in the movie, Beast has long since left the tights behind in favor of a business suit, and Angel, who also is not called by his comic book name, doesn't even show up until the movie's nearly over. And even then he does little more than save and thereby reconcile with his father, the man behind the mutant cure. Beast on the other hand, had a lot more screen time (about as much as Nightcrawler had in the last movie), and even though the thought of Kelsey Grammar covered in blue fur seemed ridiculous at the outset, he looked pretty good and I thought was actually one of the few things Ratner did right.

To review, Xavier and Cyclops are dead, Jean's joined the dark side, the young padawans are busy with there teen drama, Beast is on a human-mutant relations committee and Angel is still two acts away. All this boils down to the Wolverine and Storm show. They're the only ones left that can run the school, and they initially decide to just shut it down until wing-boy pops in and asks if he can go there. Everyone knows that Halle Berry requested that she have a bigger role in this one and it looks like she got her way. It's not that I don't think she did a good job, it's just that we went from having not enough storm to almost exclusively Storm. And as for Wolverine, yeah, I he's the most popular character and all, but the first two movies were already saturated with the guy and this movie was practically all-Wolverine all the time. And I heard he's supposed to be getting his own spin-off movie. What would be the difference? How much more Wolverine could we possibly handle?

Now let's talk about the villains. Magneto lost his right-hand woman early on, but he's got Pyro now, and some new muscle in the form of Juggernaut. His comics counterpart is impossibly hulked-out, with what looks like a giant upside down salad bowl on his head. The movie version, played by Vinnie Jones (Bullet-Tooth Tony from Snatch) is bulky, but not as big as the comics version, and his helmet doesn't go all the way to his shoulders; it's more like a bucket. He looks more like Ram-Man from He-Man.



From what I understand, when Bryan Singer left the franchise to direct Superman Returns, he took his writers with him, and Brett Ratner brought in his own guys. That's probably why Juggernaut inexplicably says "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" I'm hoping there will be a deleted scene on the DVD where he confronts Storm. "Darkness! Darkness, everyone! Darkness is spreading!" (Note: it's more likely a reference to the "Juggernaut Bitch" viral video, but it still seemed totally out of place in the movie.

There's a bunch of other pierced and tattooed baddies among Magneto's ranks, whose names take up a good chunk in the credits but are never actually said on-screen. It doesn't really matter though, because by the end they're all either dead or minus their super powers. The final battle features the mutant biker gang against the dwindling forces of the X-Men, who are rejoined by Beast, who breaks out his old jumpsuit for battle time. There's a confrontation of old nemesises (nemisi?) Iceman and Pyro, and the climactic showdown between Dark Phoenix, and the one mutant who can stop her; that little kid who can recess mutant genes simply by standing near them. No, just kidding, that would have been too easy. It's WOLVERINE! Because of his regenerative ability, he can get close enough to her to have one last glimpse at the old Jean before sticking his forks into her. So she dies. Again.

The movie looks cool, and if Singer had directed it, it could have very well surpassed the first two. Instead, it's disappointing and doesn't seem to care about the characters and relationships developed in the other movies. And this may sound weird, but it seems like he just threw some swears in the movie for no reason, like the aforementioned "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" For example. It's a shame, really.

Even so, it's still better than Batman & Robin.