| X-Men: The Last Stand Posted: WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
I may be among the few who liked this one better than the previous two. It probably was never going to be possible to create an X-Men finale that was going to please everyone. I'll confess that there were a number of things in the three-film sequence that I didn't care for. But give the team an "A" for effort in at least trying to do something interesting and compelling. My complaint with the first film was that it was so safe and tame. It didn't try to take the X-Men saga anywhere new or interesting. THE LAST STAND did. For the record, my complaint with the series is that it managed to make Rogue an unessential and uninteresting member of the team. Of all the incarnations of Rogue, this one was the least powerful and the least complex. Anna Paquin did a fine job given the script they provided, but she should have been far more empowered than she was.
Most movies based on the comics suffer from a failure of nerve. The writers want to play it safe, don't want to offend, and refuse to take risks. THE LAST STAND takes a world of risks and leaves the X-Men universe shaken from top to bottom. I loved that! I didn't think all the gambles paid off. The Phoenix story was not as interesting as it has been in the past. Part of the problem with the Phoenix is that they tried to incorporate it with too many other arcs, including the "cure" of the mutant gene.
Most of all, this film, unlike the previous two, really made me care how the story ended. In the previous two, one figured everyone would be alive at the end, so in a way precisely what happened wouldn't matter all that much. But in this one once Mystique had been "cured" and Scott and Xavier killed, there was a great sense of danger. Not every one was going to emerge OK in this one. Who would have imagined that the film would have ended with Xavier, Scott, and Jean dead, and Mystique, Magneto, and Rogue stripped of their powers?
I loved the fact that they included some of the X-Men neglected in the previous films. Kelsey Grammer was excellent as Hank McCoy, but I thought Ellen Page was perfect as Kitty Pryde, who has always been one of my favorite X-Men, mainly because her power of being able to pass through solid objects (or having solid objects pass through her) made her fascinating because employing it required so much strategy. The sequence where she and Juggernaut engage one another was a lot of fun. Vinnie Jones was almost unrecognizable, by the way, as Juggernaut. Sidenote: Many X-Men fans are bothered by the fact that traditionally Juggernaut is not a mutant. Therefore, in the scene where his powers are stripped temporarily by the mutant who robs other mutants of their ability, he should have been unaffected. But on narrative grounds I can understand why they altered this in the film.
I can understand why so many fans of the comic disliked the final movie in the trilogy. It was a sharp departure from most of the various versions of the X-Men saga found in so many of the comics and cartoon shows. But I was ecstatic to see them try something really different and risky. They didn't take the safe route. And I personally found the story far more interesting than the first two films precisely for that reason. Yeah, I wish Rogue had been conceived differently in the trilogy and I wish the Phoenix story had been handled better, but I realize that because there have been so many permutations of the X-Men, everyone is going to contruct their own private version. This isn't quite the version I would have come up with had I the ability to cherry pick the elements I like, but this one managed the most important task: it made the story interesting. |
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