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Warning: Spoilers
That's personal opinion of course. The first X-Men was well made and enjoyable and X2 was an example of a sequel being better than its predecessor with a bigger and darker approach that built on what was introduced in the first and made them more interesting. The X-Men series did however take a big step backwards with X-Men The Last Stand, but while it is the weakest of the series considering the stuff that has been said about it it was better than expected. X-Men The Last Stand boasts great special effects and a visual style that is both flashy and dark, both of which though in an effective way. The photography and editing is slick and you can at least see what's going on. The action scenes mostly come off very well, thrillingly choreographed and passionately performed, and it is at least edited coherently. One particularly striking moment was with Magneto manipulating San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge to become a highway to Alcatraz.
John Powell's score is not as good as Michael Kamen's or John Ottman for the previous two films and it's not one of his best works either but it is rousing and haunting and in harmony with the story and action. There are some solid performances, as seen with Hugh Jackman whose Wolverine is full of charisma; Patrick Stewart is reliably cool(some not-so-good dialogue but he makes the most of what he has) though deserved more to do; Ian McKellen is wonderfully menacing; Anna Paquin makes a real effort to bring out Rogue's feistiness; Rebecca Romijin-Stamos brings sex appeal and iciness to Mystique, and Kelsey Grammar is a big surprise as Beast(his make-up looks fantastic too), giving a fair amount of depth to the character with wonderful aplomb. The interaction between Iceman-much more comfortably played this time- and Pyro has some genuine tension as well.
X-Men The Last Stand's final action sequence was mixed. Spectacle-wise the final action sequence really delivers and it's very eye-popping but don't go looking for sense and for me it wasn't quite adrenaline-pumping enough. Ratner shows that he is completely comfortable in the action where he directs with a lot of style and technical proficiency but with the non-action parts he does fail to keep the momentum. The main problem really for X-Men The Last Stand was that while it impressed on the action and visual front, the depth, emotion and what made the first two as good as they were(especially the second) is lost. The sharpness of the dialogue that the first two films had is not really present here, the humour's corny, the exposition which the film is relatively heavy in just lumbers and doesn't go anywhere often and the emotional/darker parts feel forced, things that the first two films avoided(the second film being particularly successful). The film is too rushed and tries to incorporate too many interpersonal story lines and too many characters.
As a result, a lot of the story felt plodding and incomplete and what is done with the characters has disappointed many and in my mind was where the film fell down hard. Angel is just useless here and Jean Grey/Phoenix had real potential but she was very underwritten. Cyclops, Colossus and Xavier are all short-shrifted as well and when the most memorable of the Mutants(Juggernaut)- excepting Magneto- is not very interesting either you know there's something wrong. The main characters are either out of character or distorted, Wolverine is moody for the sake of it here whereas he had a good amount of depth as an anti-hero previously and Magneto now has been reduced to a one-dimensional villain. With the Mutants the film never goes into detail about how they became to be and why, you just get the sense that they are evil for the sake of being so. And there are performances that don't come off, Famke Janssen actually does do her best but how Jean Grey/Phoenix is written works severely against her, Vinnie Jones is one-note and annoying as Juggernaut and while Storm is more prominently developed Halle Berry's performance is even blander, didn't think it would be possible, than in the first two where Storm was one of the least interesting characters. The rest don't have enough to work with to make an impression, it was saddening really for Angel to be such a wasted opportunity and for three major characters to be killed off so indifferently.
Overall, not terrible but disappointing and I do have to agree with the consensus that it is the weakest of a mostly very good series of films. 5/10 Bethany Cox
