‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ is okay but not great
May 26, 2006Went to the midnight showing last night, or rather early this morning, for X-Men: The Last Stand. And while I was definitely entertained, it wasn’t quite up to the high standards set by the first two films.
I think the biggest problem for me was that there were simply too many mutants introduced in the film. So nobody, not even the regulars from previous movies, got much screen time for character development. Basically if you saw a character on screen you pretty much knew they were about to use their powers in some way, rather than talk or emote or otherwise show any growth in their character.
On the othe hand, the old comic book fan in me enjoyed the movie as spectacle. The effects were awesome, clearly they had a lot more money thrown at this third installment than either of the previous two movies. Weta Digital, which of course did the FX for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was the lead studio but there appeared to be a half-dozen or more FX houses listed in the credits.
The only reason I was sitting around watching the credits was to see the little snippet they put at the very end of the credits. I won’t give it away except to say it resolves one of the issues set up in the movie, and perhaps sets the stage for one of the future spin-offs (this is the last X-Men movie but supposedly there’s at least one Wolverine spin-off planned possibly more).
Overall I’d say any fan of the X-Men has to see the film, but even they might be disappointed a bit. Especially the way they worked in the whole Phoenix saga. I knew they weren’t going to duplicate much from the comic books, and the way they did work it in was rather flat. It wasn’t really central to the movie at all, they could have done without that bit of the story arc entirely.