X3: The Last Stand, or X3: The Last Straw
I anticipated the third installment in the X-Men movie series like how one anticipates the inevitability of vomitting when sick, stomach clenched and body completely held still as though there's some chance it doesn't have to end in vomit. Unfortunately, as in sickness, it usually does.
Let's go ahead and get the best part of the movie out of the way, shall we:
Yes, that's right. They did it. They put those lines in. They made the reference. They made Internet geeks happy all over the world. It was fucking great to hear that.
Onward to the catastrophe that is the rest of X3: The Last Stand.
Halle Berry is a shit-actress who needs to be fucking banned from Hollywood so that nobody has to see her bland, emotionless, Godawful acting on the Big Screen ever again. She has all the acting talent of David Spade and Dennis Miller all rolled into one. She's a fucking model, she has no place on the Big Screen, and she pretty much killed this movie.
I was quite thrilled to hear she had walked from the X-Men movie franchise, as I thought she was a pretty lame Storm, to start. Then, Catwoman. Yeah, that's enough to justify its own sentence: that's all I have to say about that. Then, Bryan Singer, the director of the first two X-Men, jumps ship and Berry is back, and I hear they're rewriting the whole script to accomodate her, and . . . And, shit, they did, and it reeked like chimp shit left out on a sunny Summer's day at the zoo.
Completely out of the character of Storm, she somehow ends up as the leader of the X-Men while Cyclops is, for whatever reason, busy being an angsty emo-kid in his bedroom for two years, completely contrary to his entire character and for what Cyclops always stood. Thanks a fuck-ton, Berry, I hope you get cervical cancer. Storm proceeds to spend the rest of the movie delivering completely useless, expository lines with no feeling. Yeah, you know how Storm was always a pretty quiet character who delivered most of her meaning through expression and action? Yeah, none of that here.
When it'd be appropriate for Storm to just electrocute some bitch-ass punk without a word, she has to go and deliver some cheesy, bullshit line first. I guess this is Halle Berry's idea of "character development," but that's understandable as the subtleties of acting via facial expression and body language is long far-gone out of her grasp. We, the viewer, have to be hit upside the head with heavy-handed and, worse yet, generic bullshit "character development" which is, for the most part, outside of the actual character of Storm.
I can not put enough emphasis on how much Halle Berry managed to ruin this potentially much greater movie.
Speaking of characters, I'm going to go ahead and get into the gross mistreatment of characterisation and development throughout X3.
Oh, wait, characterisation and development what? "What's that?" asks the screenwriters of this movie, clearly befuddled by such ideas like giving characters more than one dimension and making them, perhaps, well-rounded, life-like people.
One: Cyclops is not at all devoted to the idea of Xavier's School and the X-Men, and, instead, abandons everything to mope and cry, then, eventually—and by eventually I mean in the first fifteen minutes—die. Cyclops fails to act like a leader, fails to act like he cares, and fails to be Cyclops.
Two: Wolverine is not anything more than a series of poses and fight sequences, with no real heart or soul. All that shit about his past and every question he continuously brings up, like "Who am I?" and "What have I been doing my whole life?", was just kind of put to the side so Wolverine could menacingly loom and occasionally stab things.
Three: Rogue proceeds to get maybe four minutes of screen-time so we can establish that she is nothing but a steaming pile of angst, and so she can eventually serve as a stupid plot device.
Four: Bobby Drake throws away everything he worked so hard to get in the first two movies and in, more than likely, the last two years of storytime for something that is an empty shell of a characterless character. Speaking of which . . .
Five: Shadow Cat, or Kitty Pryde? Why is she even in this movie? Sure, she made brief cameos in the first two movies, but those were just cameos; however, everything you learnt about Kitty Pryde in X-Men 1 and 2 is pretty much everything you still know by the end of the third movie, because she is given absolutely zero defining characteristics, except that she can phase through solid objects. Oh, and she's apparently more desireable than Rogue—not that any justification or hints as to why this is true are given.
Like how Rogue and Bobby Drake were pretty much lifted from the X-Men Evolution universe to pander to that universe's fanbase, Kitty Pryde is just kind of thrown in as further hope that alluding to Evolution somehow makes the movie more "true to the comic" or something. And, while I'm on the topic of pandering . . .
Six: Angel, who is featured prominently in all the hype and trailers, gets approximately three scenes in the entire movie and serves no real purpose, except to have wings and look cool. Here is a quick renactment of his so-called "role" in X3:
Oh, and, yeah, he flies overhead at the end of the film. Great, I sure am happy they included Angel just for that bit of useless filler. What I was told by a friend is that they had so much content and hype about Angel after X2, when Singer was still in control, that it is very likely just thrown him in as a concession to that. Mmm, pander-licious.
Seven: "Hey," said the writers of X3, "Let's include the Juggernaut in the third movie, but completely fail to actually divulge a single-bit of information about his character backstory, even though he's Professor Charles Xavier's motherfucking brother." The producers agreed, "Oh, and, hey, did you see that 'I'm the Juggernaut' movie circulating the Cyberwebnet? Reference that. It'll be awesome and the only worthwhile thing in this film." The producers nodded and yelled out, "Cast some cockney-sounding guy! Whoosh, away! Off to rape some other movie franchise!"
Eight: Magneto, rather than be the reasonably conceived character he was in the first two movies, proceeds to be a gross exaggeration of the character, taken to ridiclous extremes, but it is fortunate that Ian McKellen's superpower of good acting helped to override some of that bullshit. The helmet continues to look silly.
Nine: Speaking of good acting, Kelsey Grammer manages to perform possibly the best representation of any character in the movie as Beast, taking the few scenes and sparse lines he's given and managing to actually get across a superb sense of Beast's personality. There really wasn't a better choice for casting.
Remember Mystique? You can pretty much forget her, here. Firstly, her make-up now looks like utter shit, mostly just her body painted blue (Singer took the make-up crew with him on his way out), Secondly, she serves a very bit part as a rather lame device.
Oh, also, remember Kurt Wagner, the Nightcrawler? No, you don't. Or, rather, the writers of X3 surely hope you don't, because he's not here, and it's never explained, either. What I heard was that they didn't include the Nightcrawler because "having two blue characters on the same team would've confused the audience." I do not believe it is quite possible to be more condescending and insulting to the movie-going audiences than that. They don't look a fucking little bit alike, kthxdie.
It is a form of a blessing that Nightcrawler didn't make an appearance, because they probably would've made his make-up look like shit, too, and just painted him blue and scrawled the angelic symbols all over him with a Sharpie®.
All the talk of Gambit making an appearance came to naught, as well. From IMDB.com: "Josh Holloway was offered the role of Gambit, but turned it down because the character was too similar to his character on "Lost" (2004). As a result, the character was never added to the film since this would have been a special cameo put in later had Josh decided to sign on."
Dear Josh Holloway,
Does your character on Lost imbue matter with explosive energy and hurl playing cards around while wielding a staff? If so, maybe I'll actually check that show out.
At the end of X2, the "X-Men" comic fanbase rose together in joy to see that the next movie, envisioned as just as awesome as the first two, would be dealing with one of the most pivotal storylines in the history of the "X-Men" comics, namely the "Dark Pheonix" saga. What the fanbase did not foresee was control of the movie being handed over to a hack like Brett Ratner, whose biggest claim to fame was the shit-stain of a movie and its even shittier sequel, Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2.
In lieu of a movie devoted to the "Dark Pheonix" saga, what we are, instead, given is a mediocre mixture of the "Dark Phoenix" plot and the "Mutant Cure" plot. Now, you know all the parts of the "Dark Pheonix" saga that made it interesting, the cosmic being controlling Jean Grey and all that? No, no, no. She just had massive amounts of power, all along, now, and that's that. Oh, uh, yeah, psychic barriers, split personality, blah, blah: half-assed excuse of a plot that mostly entails actress Famke Janssen standing and looking menacing at the camera. Exciting! Oh, a resolution to the Logan-Jean-Scott triangle is presented in the form of blowing Cyclops up early on in the film, so that Storm can step up and be acting leader of the X-Men and Halle Berry can show the world how bad an actress she truly can be.
Mmm, mutant cure. "Hi!," says child actor Cameron Bright, "You may remember me from such roles as the creepy little kid in Birth who convinces a widow that he's the reincarnation of her dead husband, which had potential to be much more interesting but the movie flaked out at the ending and it was all quite abortive. I'll be here in X3 as the character, Leech, whose mutant power is to suppress all other mutant powers except, conveniently, my own mutant power, in a small radius, for a temporary amount of time. For some reason, they are able to use my mutant genetics to glean a cure for mutation, I guess by injecting other people with my DNA, which magically enables my power in them, even though putting genes in someone's bloodstream in no fashion somehow causes them to instanteously develop the traits corresponding to them. Anyway, whereas my character was an alien in the comics and thus the premise made a remote amount of comic-sense, I'm just a mutant here, so none of this makes any sense! Fun, huh?! I'm really getting used to this whole 'playing a half-baked plot device' game.
"Also, for no good reason, nobody will think to use me as a weapon against the Brotherhood of Mutants or the Dark Pheonix, despite the fact we were on the same tiny island for the last big scene of the movie. Kind of silly, huh? I guess they didn't want to negate the big, touching, clichéd finalé!" Ugh, I hate you so much, X3 writers. It's like they took a special training course in writing half-assed plots based on ludicrous premises which aren't fully developed and that inevitably end in the most typical, Hollywood style feasible. There's only so much to be expected from a writing staff who so miserably failed to utilise the character of Angel as more than just a one-trick pony.
In defense of Last Stand, it's not like the cameo appearances or sidekick villians in the previous two movies had been really given any substance, either (See: Sabretooth, Frog, Lady Deathstrike, Collosus, Jubilee, and so forth). These parts really served no function outside of either a nod to the comic fans or as a wielder of cool-looking powers to be muscle or glamour. It's when you take characters with no substance like Kitty Pryde and throw her in the audiences face as a supposedly significant character that it begins to insult the audience with these paper doll plays featuring one-dimensional stars.
And to take characters that had been given substance in the previous two movies, like Rogue, Bobby Drake, and Pyro, and use them to such ineffectual ends as teenager angst vehicles is equally insulting. Why do I care that Bobby Drake is frollicking about with Kitty, when there's been no establishment of the depth of his relationship with Rogue, outside of a single, offhanded comment like "How do you think I am, I can't touch my boyfriend, waah!" Am I supposed to see the appeal of the Kitty Pryde character when she is given literally no history or personality, just a cute face and ice-skating? And am I supposed to feel the tension between Pyro and Iceman just because I "know" it's there from the last movie, despite it being nothing more than a gimmick in X3 for more corny lines?
Speaking of corny lines . . . Jesus Christ Almighty, who pays people to come up with this tripe? (Answer: FOX.)
X-Men and X2 had lines that were subtle and witty, albeit sometimes corny—always self-aware of being corny, though. X3 was just full of lines trying to be subtle and witty, trying their damnedest to live up to the first two movies, and failing miserably. There were way too many lines of dialogue in this movie which were meant to be moving or poignant, and I just rolled my eyes or groaned, or, alternatively, both, simultaneously, at the same time (See: every single line of dialogue delivered by Halle Berry; I would have put some from Storm up, but, honestly, none stood out as remarkably worse than the rest and it was all about how piss-poorly Berry delievered each and every sentence she uttered, not the actual words; Berry could make Shakespeare sound like Friends). They committed the worst crime of all action writing, too: not being aware of how corny the dialogue was at times. No, they weren't "B.A.", not even close to "B.A.M.F.", just bad.
Ah, yes. I'm going to take a paragraph or two here for a tangent a lot of people won't really care about: the Chess metaphor.
So, in the first two installments, we had Magneto sometimes making reference to Chess, but in sensible and usually not overt ways. The last scene of X-Men had him and Charles playing a game of Chess. All well and good, typical fare for the "supervillian" archetype. Mmm-yes, yes, Chess is a game of strategery and manipulation, indeed.
So, in X3, where par for the course is the writers trying to mimic the first two movies and taking everything to level of retarded absurdity, Magneto makes overt and . . . dumb references to Chess, here. He delivers the line, at the beginning of the final, huge, confrontation slash battle scene, "In Chess, the pawns go first."
First Point of Contention: In Chess, there are twenty possible opening moves. Four of them involve a Knight and not a Pawn, and they are the opening moves of common Opening Games.
And, as the scene progresses and many of his grunt soldiers fall in battle, he delivers another line: "That is why the pawns go first," or somesuch.
Second Point of Contention: Wait, what? The fuck is that supposed to mean? The pawns go first in Chess so that they can be needlessly sacrificed? Is he trying to imply that you send your pawns out in chess just to die? No, bullshit; in Chess, the Pawn Game is almost always the deciding factor in many advanced matches, and you will find that great chessmasters forfeit the game as soon as they realise that they can no longer win the Pawn Game. The Pawn Game, of course, being the End Game where it's just two Kings and a number of Pawns. Many great chess matches are decided by a single pawn advantage. You do not send your pawns out to just be obliterated, fuckwits. That is not how good Chess is played, ever.
Dear X-Men 3 Writers,
Play some fucking Chess before you try and write clever Chess references.
To Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Kelsey Grammer, Anna Paquin, and Ben Foster: you are great actors and I am deeply sorry there is nothing you could've done with the script to X3 to make it a redeemable film. You did the best you could, and, in actuality, delivered a pretty shining performance, overall, in fact. The acting in the movie was pretty superb.
To Halle Berry: I hope you spontaneously combust, I hope your flesh melts off your body, I hope your bones shatter and your uterus turns to centipedes, I hope your eyes turn into spiders and your intestines turn into maggots, I hope you simmer alive in writhing agony for hours and hours and hours before finally experiencing the sweet release of death.
To Brett Ratner: Stick to cheap trick movies like Rush Hour and other such garbage, and leave the real movies to the Big Boys.
To the writers: I hope the money you got for this trite shit helps soothe the pain of knowing you have created one of the worst scripts in Hollywood history.
To Bryan Singer: Please, please, please do the next X-Men movie, please, please, please. Don't let FOX continue to rape this franchise like a drunken sorority girl at a frat party.
This movie was littered with horrible dialogue and the execution of every single plot and subplot in this film was pretty much half-assed. Nobody was really trying, and it showed. The music was listenable, but it was a very bland score, standard fare. The effects were overblown and pretty. It was easy to get caught up in X3: The Last Stand and stare gleefully at the shiny lights and colours, be entranced by the elaborate fight scenes: all the money and effort was clearly put into effects and fight choreography, so pay close attention there, that's your money's worth. If you pretend Halle Berry never opens her mouth and don't think too hard about the actual story of the movie, it's a fun movie. If you're looking for a good followup to the last two X-Men movies . . . Well, I'm sorry—keep moving.
Failure Rating: 78%
That Is All; Thank You
"Why You Always Gotta Scream When You Enter a Room?"
Let's go ahead and get the best part of the movie out of the way, shall we:
[SCENE: Juggernaut is going for Leech, the mutant boy who is the source of the cure, in the research complex, with Kitty Pryde trying to outmanuever him and get to the boy first. She leaps onto and grabs him, using her mutant ability to drag him halfway into the floor.]
JUGGERNAUT: Doesn't she know who I am?
[BEAT]
JUGGERNAUT: I'm the Juggernaut!
[BEAT]
JUGGERNAUT: BITCH!
Yes, that's right. They did it. They put those lines in. They made the reference. They made Internet geeks happy all over the world. It was fucking great to hear that.
Onward to the catastrophe that is the rest of X3: The Last Stand.
The Ugly
Halle Berry is a shit-actress who needs to be fucking banned from Hollywood so that nobody has to see her bland, emotionless, Godawful acting on the Big Screen ever again. She has all the acting talent of David Spade and Dennis Miller all rolled into one. She's a fucking model, she has no place on the Big Screen, and she pretty much killed this movie.
I was quite thrilled to hear she had walked from the X-Men movie franchise, as I thought she was a pretty lame Storm, to start. Then, Catwoman. Yeah, that's enough to justify its own sentence: that's all I have to say about that. Then, Bryan Singer, the director of the first two X-Men, jumps ship and Berry is back, and I hear they're rewriting the whole script to accomodate her, and . . . And, shit, they did, and it reeked like chimp shit left out on a sunny Summer's day at the zoo.
Completely out of the character of Storm, she somehow ends up as the leader of the X-Men while Cyclops is, for whatever reason, busy being an angsty emo-kid in his bedroom for two years, completely contrary to his entire character and for what Cyclops always stood. Thanks a fuck-ton, Berry, I hope you get cervical cancer. Storm proceeds to spend the rest of the movie delivering completely useless, expository lines with no feeling. Yeah, you know how Storm was always a pretty quiet character who delivered most of her meaning through expression and action? Yeah, none of that here.
When it'd be appropriate for Storm to just electrocute some bitch-ass punk without a word, she has to go and deliver some cheesy, bullshit line first. I guess this is Halle Berry's idea of "character development," but that's understandable as the subtleties of acting via facial expression and body language is long far-gone out of her grasp. We, the viewer, have to be hit upside the head with heavy-handed and, worse yet, generic bullshit "character development" which is, for the most part, outside of the actual character of Storm.
I can not put enough emphasis on how much Halle Berry managed to ruin this potentially much greater movie.
The Uglier
Speaking of characters, I'm going to go ahead and get into the gross mistreatment of characterisation and development throughout X3.
Oh, wait, characterisation and development what? "What's that?" asks the screenwriters of this movie, clearly befuddled by such ideas like giving characters more than one dimension and making them, perhaps, well-rounded, life-like people.
One: Cyclops is not at all devoted to the idea of Xavier's School and the X-Men, and, instead, abandons everything to mope and cry, then, eventually—and by eventually I mean in the first fifteen minutes—die. Cyclops fails to act like a leader, fails to act like he cares, and fails to be Cyclops.
Two: Wolverine is not anything more than a series of poses and fight sequences, with no real heart or soul. All that shit about his past and every question he continuously brings up, like "Who am I?" and "What have I been doing my whole life?", was just kind of put to the side so Wolverine could menacingly loom and occasionally stab things.
Three: Rogue proceeds to get maybe four minutes of screen-time so we can establish that she is nothing but a steaming pile of angst, and so she can eventually serve as a stupid plot device.
Four: Bobby Drake throws away everything he worked so hard to get in the first two movies and in, more than likely, the last two years of storytime for something that is an empty shell of a characterless character. Speaking of which . . .
Five: Shadow Cat, or Kitty Pryde? Why is she even in this movie? Sure, she made brief cameos in the first two movies, but those were just cameos; however, everything you learnt about Kitty Pryde in X-Men 1 and 2 is pretty much everything you still know by the end of the third movie, because she is given absolutely zero defining characteristics, except that she can phase through solid objects. Oh, and she's apparently more desireable than Rogue—not that any justification or hints as to why this is true are given.
Like how Rogue and Bobby Drake were pretty much lifted from the X-Men Evolution universe to pander to that universe's fanbase, Kitty Pryde is just kind of thrown in as further hope that alluding to Evolution somehow makes the movie more "true to the comic" or something. And, while I'm on the topic of pandering . . .
Clipped Wings
Six: Angel, who is featured prominently in all the hype and trailers, gets approximately three scenes in the entire movie and serves no real purpose, except to have wings and look cool. Here is a quick renactment of his so-called "role" in X3:
[SCENE ONE: A young boy at a mirror cuts at his back with a knife.]
WARREN, AGE TEN: Ow, it hurts when you cut off a part of your own body!
WORTHINGTON, SR: It is certainly most distressing to me to see that my son has wings!
WARREN: Aw, but . . . I'm cutting them off, Dad! Just for you!
[SCENE TWO: Some generic lab-looking setting, complete with prop scientists and shiny, sterile things.]
WARREN, AGE TWENTY: My father wants me to get the mutant cure, and I don't wanna.
WORTHINGTON, SR: I made this cure all to cure you, Warren!
WARREN: Oh noes! Changed my mind, Dad! [Flies away.]
[SCENE THREE]
ANGEL: Hey, X-Men, can I chill here?
X-MEN: We are sad . . . But, Sure!
ANGEL: Sweet!
Oh, and, yeah, he flies overhead at the end of the film. Great, I sure am happy they included Angel just for that bit of useless filler. What I was told by a friend is that they had so much content and hype about Angel after X2, when Singer was still in control, that it is very likely just thrown him in as a concession to that. Mmm, pander-licious.
Nine Characters in Search of a Good Movie
Seven: "Hey," said the writers of X3, "Let's include the Juggernaut in the third movie, but completely fail to actually divulge a single-bit of information about his character backstory, even though he's Professor Charles Xavier's motherfucking brother." The producers agreed, "Oh, and, hey, did you see that 'I'm the Juggernaut' movie circulating the Cyberwebnet? Reference that. It'll be awesome and the only worthwhile thing in this film." The producers nodded and yelled out, "Cast some cockney-sounding guy! Whoosh, away! Off to rape some other movie franchise!"
Eight: Magneto, rather than be the reasonably conceived character he was in the first two movies, proceeds to be a gross exaggeration of the character, taken to ridiclous extremes, but it is fortunate that Ian McKellen's superpower of good acting helped to override some of that bullshit. The helmet continues to look silly.
Nine: Speaking of good acting, Kelsey Grammer manages to perform possibly the best representation of any character in the movie as Beast, taking the few scenes and sparse lines he's given and managing to actually get across a superb sense of Beast's personality. There really wasn't a better choice for casting.
Shooting Blanks
Remember Mystique? You can pretty much forget her, here. Firstly, her make-up now looks like utter shit, mostly just her body painted blue (Singer took the make-up crew with him on his way out), Secondly, she serves a very bit part as a rather lame device.
Oh, also, remember Kurt Wagner, the Nightcrawler? No, you don't. Or, rather, the writers of X3 surely hope you don't, because he's not here, and it's never explained, either. What I heard was that they didn't include the Nightcrawler because "having two blue characters on the same team would've confused the audience." I do not believe it is quite possible to be more condescending and insulting to the movie-going audiences than that. They don't look a fucking little bit alike, kthxdie.
It is a form of a blessing that Nightcrawler didn't make an appearance, because they probably would've made his make-up look like shit, too, and just painted him blue and scrawled the angelic symbols all over him with a Sharpie®.
All the talk of Gambit making an appearance came to naught, as well. From IMDB.com: "Josh Holloway was offered the role of Gambit, but turned it down because the character was too similar to his character on "Lost" (2004). As a result, the character was never added to the film since this would have been a special cameo put in later had Josh decided to sign on."
Dear Josh Holloway,
Does your character on Lost imbue matter with explosive energy and hurl playing cards around while wielding a staff? If so, maybe I'll actually check that show out.
A Tale Too Shitty
At the end of X2, the "X-Men" comic fanbase rose together in joy to see that the next movie, envisioned as just as awesome as the first two, would be dealing with one of the most pivotal storylines in the history of the "X-Men" comics, namely the "Dark Pheonix" saga. What the fanbase did not foresee was control of the movie being handed over to a hack like Brett Ratner, whose biggest claim to fame was the shit-stain of a movie and its even shittier sequel, Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2.
In lieu of a movie devoted to the "Dark Pheonix" saga, what we are, instead, given is a mediocre mixture of the "Dark Phoenix" plot and the "Mutant Cure" plot. Now, you know all the parts of the "Dark Pheonix" saga that made it interesting, the cosmic being controlling Jean Grey and all that? No, no, no. She just had massive amounts of power, all along, now, and that's that. Oh, uh, yeah, psychic barriers, split personality, blah, blah: half-assed excuse of a plot that mostly entails actress Famke Janssen standing and looking menacing at the camera. Exciting! Oh, a resolution to the Logan-Jean-Scott triangle is presented in the form of blowing Cyclops up early on in the film, so that Storm can step up and be acting leader of the X-Men and Halle Berry can show the world how bad an actress she truly can be.
Mmm, mutant cure. "Hi!," says child actor Cameron Bright, "You may remember me from such roles as the creepy little kid in Birth who convinces a widow that he's the reincarnation of her dead husband, which had potential to be much more interesting but the movie flaked out at the ending and it was all quite abortive. I'll be here in X3 as the character, Leech, whose mutant power is to suppress all other mutant powers except, conveniently, my own mutant power, in a small radius, for a temporary amount of time. For some reason, they are able to use my mutant genetics to glean a cure for mutation, I guess by injecting other people with my DNA, which magically enables my power in them, even though putting genes in someone's bloodstream in no fashion somehow causes them to instanteously develop the traits corresponding to them. Anyway, whereas my character was an alien in the comics and thus the premise made a remote amount of comic-sense, I'm just a mutant here, so none of this makes any sense! Fun, huh?! I'm really getting used to this whole 'playing a half-baked plot device' game.
"Also, for no good reason, nobody will think to use me as a weapon against the Brotherhood of Mutants or the Dark Pheonix, despite the fact we were on the same tiny island for the last big scene of the movie. Kind of silly, huh? I guess they didn't want to negate the big, touching, clichéd finalé!" Ugh, I hate you so much, X3 writers. It's like they took a special training course in writing half-assed plots based on ludicrous premises which aren't fully developed and that inevitably end in the most typical, Hollywood style feasible. There's only so much to be expected from a writing staff who so miserably failed to utilise the character of Angel as more than just a one-trick pony.
In defense of Last Stand, it's not like the cameo appearances or sidekick villians in the previous two movies had been really given any substance, either (See: Sabretooth, Frog, Lady Deathstrike, Collosus, Jubilee, and so forth). These parts really served no function outside of either a nod to the comic fans or as a wielder of cool-looking powers to be muscle or glamour. It's when you take characters with no substance like Kitty Pryde and throw her in the audiences face as a supposedly significant character that it begins to insult the audience with these paper doll plays featuring one-dimensional stars.
And to take characters that had been given substance in the previous two movies, like Rogue, Bobby Drake, and Pyro, and use them to such ineffectual ends as teenager angst vehicles is equally insulting. Why do I care that Bobby Drake is frollicking about with Kitty, when there's been no establishment of the depth of his relationship with Rogue, outside of a single, offhanded comment like "How do you think I am, I can't touch my boyfriend, waah!" Am I supposed to see the appeal of the Kitty Pryde character when she is given literally no history or personality, just a cute face and ice-skating? And am I supposed to feel the tension between Pyro and Iceman just because I "know" it's there from the last movie, despite it being nothing more than a gimmick in X3 for more corny lines?
The Ugliest
Speaking of corny lines . . . Jesus Christ Almighty, who pays people to come up with this tripe? (Answer: FOX.)
CYCLOPS: Not everybody heals as fast as you, Logan.
(Ouch. Argh. Eech. So. Corny.)
MAGNETO: They wish to cure us . . . And I say we are the cure!
(Hyuck!)
MAGNETO: I have been marked once, my dear and let me assure you, no needle shall ever touch my skin again.
(See, it's a profound statement, because he's referring to the Holocaust, so that's profound . . . and deep. Yeah, clever.)
BEAST: Wolverine. I hear you are quite an animal.
WOLVERINE: Looks who's talkin'.
(ZING! Look Who's Talkin', Too and Look Who's Talkin', Now were pretty bad sequels, too.)
MAGNETO: Charles always wanted to build bridges.
(BWAHAHAHA, IT'S FUNNY 'CAUSE PROFESSOR X MEANT IT METAPHORICALLY AND HE JUST MOVED A REAL BRIDGE! COMEDY GENIUS!)
WOLVERINE: Let's see you grow those back!
(AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, IT'S FUNNY 'CAUSE HE'S REFERRING TO HIS TESTICLES!)
(Lastly . . . )
DARK PHEONIX: You would die for them?!
WOLVERINE: No, not for them . . . For you!
(I could very nearly hear the violin music swelling at this point. Gag me with a spoon!)
X-Men and X2 had lines that were subtle and witty, albeit sometimes corny—always self-aware of being corny, though. X3 was just full of lines trying to be subtle and witty, trying their damnedest to live up to the first two movies, and failing miserably. There were way too many lines of dialogue in this movie which were meant to be moving or poignant, and I just rolled my eyes or groaned, or, alternatively, both, simultaneously, at the same time (See: every single line of dialogue delivered by Halle Berry; I would have put some from Storm up, but, honestly, none stood out as remarkably worse than the rest and it was all about how piss-poorly Berry delievered each and every sentence she uttered, not the actual words; Berry could make Shakespeare sound like Friends). They committed the worst crime of all action writing, too: not being aware of how corny the dialogue was at times. No, they weren't "B.A.", not even close to "B.A.M.F.", just bad.
Callisto to F6, Beast to H3
Ah, yes. I'm going to take a paragraph or two here for a tangent a lot of people won't really care about: the Chess metaphor.
So, in the first two installments, we had Magneto sometimes making reference to Chess, but in sensible and usually not overt ways. The last scene of X-Men had him and Charles playing a game of Chess. All well and good, typical fare for the "supervillian" archetype. Mmm-yes, yes, Chess is a game of strategery and manipulation, indeed.
So, in X3, where par for the course is the writers trying to mimic the first two movies and taking everything to level of retarded absurdity, Magneto makes overt and . . . dumb references to Chess, here. He delivers the line, at the beginning of the final, huge, confrontation slash battle scene, "In Chess, the pawns go first."
First Point of Contention: In Chess, there are twenty possible opening moves. Four of them involve a Knight and not a Pawn, and they are the opening moves of common Opening Games.
And, as the scene progresses and many of his grunt soldiers fall in battle, he delivers another line: "That is why the pawns go first," or somesuch.
Second Point of Contention: Wait, what? The fuck is that supposed to mean? The pawns go first in Chess so that they can be needlessly sacrificed? Is he trying to imply that you send your pawns out in chess just to die? No, bullshit; in Chess, the Pawn Game is almost always the deciding factor in many advanced matches, and you will find that great chessmasters forfeit the game as soon as they realise that they can no longer win the Pawn Game. The Pawn Game, of course, being the End Game where it's just two Kings and a number of Pawns. Many great chess matches are decided by a single pawn advantage. You do not send your pawns out to just be obliterated, fuckwits. That is not how good Chess is played, ever.
Dear X-Men 3 Writers,
Play some fucking Chess before you try and write clever Chess references.
In Conclusion
To Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Kelsey Grammer, Anna Paquin, and Ben Foster: you are great actors and I am deeply sorry there is nothing you could've done with the script to X3 to make it a redeemable film. You did the best you could, and, in actuality, delivered a pretty shining performance, overall, in fact. The acting in the movie was pretty superb.
To Halle Berry: I hope you spontaneously combust, I hope your flesh melts off your body, I hope your bones shatter and your uterus turns to centipedes, I hope your eyes turn into spiders and your intestines turn into maggots, I hope you simmer alive in writhing agony for hours and hours and hours before finally experiencing the sweet release of death.
To Brett Ratner: Stick to cheap trick movies like Rush Hour and other such garbage, and leave the real movies to the Big Boys.
To the writers: I hope the money you got for this trite shit helps soothe the pain of knowing you have created one of the worst scripts in Hollywood history.
To Bryan Singer: Please, please, please do the next X-Men movie, please, please, please. Don't let FOX continue to rape this franchise like a drunken sorority girl at a frat party.
This movie was littered with horrible dialogue and the execution of every single plot and subplot in this film was pretty much half-assed. Nobody was really trying, and it showed. The music was listenable, but it was a very bland score, standard fare. The effects were overblown and pretty. It was easy to get caught up in X3: The Last Stand and stare gleefully at the shiny lights and colours, be entranced by the elaborate fight scenes: all the money and effort was clearly put into effects and fight choreography, so pay close attention there, that's your money's worth. If you pretend Halle Berry never opens her mouth and don't think too hard about the actual story of the movie, it's a fun movie. If you're looking for a good followup to the last two X-Men movies . . . Well, I'm sorry—keep moving.
Failure Rating: 78%
That Is All; Thank You
posted by c.Jay Wrong at
11:45 PM
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