filkertom | X-MEN 3: THE LAST STAND Spoiler Thread

Anne and I saw it, and we both thought it was pretty good. Especially considering how much they crammed into it. (If you have not seen the first two movies, don't bother until you do -- just as with The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, they're not gonna hold your hand.) A few lines here and there jangled -- for instance, I can think of several different ways to explain Jean being Phoenix than the one they used -- and some characters, most notably Mystique, got pretty badly shafted. But they didn't pull punches; they weren't worrying so much about the X-Men being Costumed Heroes as they were about showing this really was a war between Homo Sapiens and Homo Superior.

There was a surprising amount of character work, as well -- often economical to the point of streamlined, but damn if it didn't work anyway. The two love triangles were drawn with very clean, simple lines and situations, and yet they, along with the acting (particularly, again, Hugh Jackman and Anna Paquin) made it all work. Shawn Ashmore and Ellen Page as Bobbie Drake and Kitty Pride stepped up and did great. In fact, let's get that aspect out of the way: There really isn't a bad performance here, and there are many good ones. Halle Berry gets something to work with and makes it count; Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are, well, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.

Many, many touches, many cool moments. The ice-skating scene, of course. The introduction of Madrox. Wolverine and Storm, crying for Xavier. Kelsey Grammar was excellent as Hank McCoy, and earned his paycheck just by convincingly saying, "Oh, my stars and garters". They also made him fight like the Beast does in the comics, too. I was worried that Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut wouldn't cut it, but he really sold well. So did Aaron Stanford as Pyro and Dania Ramirez as Callisto -- they liked being Evil Mutants.

And then we come to the crimson elephant in the room: Famke Janssen. Bluntly, in the first two films she wasn't all that good, and she wasn't all that hot. She does all right here, though, enough so at least that you can see why Cyclops (James Marsden) and Logan (Jackman) love her. And, as Phoenix, she is damn scary, not because she looks so dangerous, but because somehow, between direction and make-up and SFX, they created a synergy that conveys her dangerousness.

That's actually a big, important thing here: As in the first X-film, as in Spider-Man 2 with the fight on the train, X3 sells the idea of superpowers in a way that few other films have. You truly get the idea of why mutants are feared.

Natch, you have to wait all the way till the end.

There are plot holes, the biggest two being: When Storm and Wolverine found Jean, why didn't Logan hold up Scott's glasses and say, "I found these," so Storm could say, "Where's Scott?" and Logan could answer, "I don't know"? Scott's missing, Jean's alive, c'mon, people, use a braincell or two. Same thing: During the final attack, Magneto just yanked the frickin' Golden Gate Bridge off its moorings and moved it somewhere more aesthetically pleasing. There are six X-Men in front of him, two of which are substantially metal. He could've wadded up Colossus like a sheet of aluminum foil, and flung Logan hither and yon to slash his own team to ribbons.

But I guess they wouldn't have had a big fight scene that way. They just would've, y'know, won.

That being said, I enjoyed it. Not a classic, but satisfying. Maybe satisfying and a quarter.

Anything to share?