Eugene Weekly : Movie Review : 06.22.06

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Dark Times for Mutants

X-Men, less than united.

BY MOLLY TEMPLETON

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND: Directed by Brett Ratner. Written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. Cinematography, Dante Spinotti. Music, John Powell. Starring Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Patrick Stewart, Kelsey Grammer, Anna Paquin, Shawn Ashmore and many more. 20th Century Fox, 2006. PG-13. 104 minutes.

It was with some trepidation that I watched X-Men: The Last Stand, the third X-film and the first directed by Brett Ratner. Ratner made his name with action (Rush Hour) and has picked up the reins of a series before (Red Dragon), but his uninspired style isn't on par with that of X-Men and X2 director Bryan Singer (whose Superman Returns is out next week). Singer had a clear empathy for his characters; he spent time showing how their mutant abilities shaped their lives and decisions. He also had a handle on the X-universe's inherent subtexts about power, otherness, freedom and acceptance.

Ratner at least gets the power aspect. In the Jean/Phoenix part of The Last Stand (inspired by comic writer Chris Claremont's "Dark Phoenix Saga"), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) has returned from her apparent death (in X2) a changed woman. A latent and powerful part of her pysche that calls itself Phoenix has broken loose from the psychic blocks behind which Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) had trapped it years before. In an early scene with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Jean's mental turmoil is painfully clear. Her horror at what her alter ego has done is wrenching, but it's not long before Phoenix reasserts herself and flees.

As for the mutant cure (a notion borrowed from the Joss Whedon-penned "Astonishing X-Men" comic book series), it elicits drastically different reactions. Brought word of the cure's existence by his old friend and student Dr. Henry McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), Xavier, as always, advocates peace and understanding. But for Magneto (Ian McKellen), the very idea of a "cure" is abhorrent. He wants it — and those who designed it — destroyed.

And that's not to mention the teenage love triangle between Bobby (Shawn Ashmore), Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and cure-considering Rogue (Anna Paquin); the troubled life of Warren Worthington III (Ben Foster), the mutant whose father developed the cure; Wolverine's longing for Jean; or the host of new characters, including Magneto's new recruits, many of whom are Asian, Hispanic or visibly mutated, and all "class three" or below (uber-powerful Jean is "class five"). In a different film, this might have been a disturbing suggestion about Xavier's recruitment tactics, or mutant power levels along racial lines. But Ratner's movie has little time for these characters, who barely have lines or names, and no time for such complex issues.

The Last Stand feels constantly in a hurry, the character-developing quiet moments rushed through on the way to another action-packed sequence. Dialogue-heavy scenes are shot in bland close-up, characters centered in the frame like talking heads on a television. People speak in clichéd quips: When Wolverine pauses, not wanting to run off and use any means necessary against Jean just yet, Storm (Halle Berry) snaps at him, "If you're with us, be with us!"

But with them Wolverine is, right through a final battle that alternates epic moments with disappointingly illogical scenes. As Magneto points his soldiers at the facility where the cure was created, Jean/Phoenix stands around looking gloomy, curiously uninvolved though her powers could have taken care of the whole thing in a trice. Even more oddly, Jean's friends, the people she sacrificed herself for in the last film, seem focused only on stopping her, not on helping her. Power corrupts; too much power can only be destroyed.

The Last Stand has plenty of action and impressive set pieces, but it loses sight of the themes and relationships that made the first two X-movies work so well. Ratner's film is so uncertain about its characters that near the end, after the brutal and deadly battle, Wolverine strolls into the sunlight smiling. We haven't forgotten what happened just moments before. Why would he?