Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

Here's another of my movie reviews. This one's for "X-Men: The Last Stand", the third movie involving the mutants from Marvel's hit comic book series.

Now I liked the first movie, and I really loved the second movie. In fact, "X2" was my pick for movie of the year when it came out in 2003. So going in, I had all the hopes that this one would hit it out of the park. Then came the changes, like Bryan Singer, who directed the first two X-films, leaving to do Superman Returns and Brett Ratner, whose films are hit or miss with me, taking over. Still with all that, I had hopes that this one would be good, especially after seeing the trailers.

Well after seeing it, it was good. But I had hoped it'll do so much more.

With the first two films, they got the ball rolling right off the start. With this, it was slow at first, key fight scenes should've been a lot longer, like they did with the first two. And the fights that they did have were short ones, not unlike the other films which were a lot longer.

With a lot of characters, both good and evil, in the storyline, there's always that fine line between having too many people and not enough screen time for them all. What they did with the third one was get rid of a lot of key people too soon and introduced others that didn't do enough. Now that was a disappointment.

What I did like was Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, who always delivers with each X-film, and I'm sure he'll do the same with his own spinoff film. I was impressed by Kelsey Grammer (TV's Frasier) as Beast. At first, I had my doubts, but his peformance was quite good and he definitely proved me wrong. Ian McKellen as Magneto was another one who always delivers with his role and I liked some of the X-kids portrayals as well.

It wasn't as much about the actors that I didn't like, it was the fact they short-changed some of them, made little use of others and introduced some that was totally unneccessary. In my opinion, I think they crammed too much story and had not enough action.

Still, I liked the film. It was good, but it had the potential to do so much more. I believe that each sequel should improve upon it's previous film. And although this one was OK, The Last Stand didn't improve upon "X2" in my mind. Which was a shame really, cause I had hoped this would be the best film of the summer.