X-Men: The Last Stand

Here's a sentence I never expected to write when I nominated him for a Braffy last year:

I have begrudgingly gained some respect for director Brett Ratner.

Not because his new movie X-Men: The Last Stand is any good. It isn't. An obvious rush job that flagrantly violates the reality of the other films in its franchise, Last Stand provides reasonable, superficial summer entertainment and nothing more.

But I can't help but admire the ambition of Ratner's latest and best movie. He didn't just step in to another director's series and try to replicate what had already been done. This isn't X2 regurgitated. Attempting to explode the series' scope and impact while simultaneously bringing all the loose threads to a close, Ratner throws in literally every element of X-Men comic books that any fan might want to see filmed.

There's a throwaway post-apocalyptic simulation fight sequence in the Danger Room, introductions of more new mutants than three movies could adequately establish, dramatic deaths for major characters and huge mutant battles featuring hundreds of extras and heavy casualties. Ratner's film is outrageous and silly and surprisingly big, which is a new and welcome direction for a series that has tended towards the plain and dour in the past.

Bryan Singer's previous two X-Men films ignored soap opera melodramatics and brutal fight scenes, the comic book's primary concerns, placing the mutant characters in an otherwise realistic and relatable world. Ratner throws all of this caution and care out the window almost immediately which is pretty much fine with me as I don't feel any kind of long-standing emotional attachment to the characters. The problem is that the mertis of his film don't match his outsized conceptual ideas. He's made a big movie that's energetic but lacking for wit, style, flash and, frequently, common sense.



This image highlights perhaps the biggest single drawback to The Last Stand. It looks cheesy. Some of this can surely be blamed on Brett Ratner. He's basically a TV director working in film. There's no indication that he pays attention to things like composition - the shots all look the same and each scene follows the same pattern. Establishing shot-medium shot-close up-medium shot-close up-reaction close up-medium shot and we're out. Even if viewers aren't paying close attention to the editing, this kind of rote repetition of shots and cuts just drags a movie down and makes it visually uninteresting. Small things like camera placement make a huge difference sometimes.

But Ratner's not the only one to blame for X-Men: The Last Stand barely making the cut as an effects film. As I said, the fact that Fox rushed the film for a Summer '06 release is blatantly, glaringly obvious from the start. The first scene goes back in time 20 years from the end of X2 and finds X-Men leader Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his then-cohort Magneto (Ian McKellan) visiting the home of powerful young mutant Jean Grey (Haley Ramm, Famke Janssen as an adult). Ratner employs computer effects to de-age the two stately old actors with minimal success. My roommates didn't notice any CGI had been employed, but simply thought it was bad make-up. I thought they looked like somebody rubbed a bunch of vaseline on their faces and then dyed their hair.

Jumping ahead 20 years, the film opens proper with the introduction of Warren Worthington II (Michael Murphy), a pharmaceutical executive whose firm has discovered a an injection to permanently rob a mutant of his or her powers, touted as a "mutant cure."

Xavier and the rest of his X-Men are insulted by the suggestion that they need to be cured, bringing to mind, briefly, the contemporary argument about "curing" homosexuality, but agree that mutants should be permitted to get the cure if they want. Magneto and his newfound Brotherhood of Mutants consider the move a declaration of war by humanity against mutant-kind. Sides are drawn, requiring many characters to make the titular stand.

Unbalancing this dyanmic, unchanged through all three films in the trilogy, is the reintroduciton of Jean Grey, who died at the end of Part 2. She's back, though far more powerful and prone to fits of uncontrollable rage. In her first scene in the film, a moment that typifies the movie's approach to this material, she kills herself an X-Man.

Many other mutants will die during the film, some of them central characters, and others will be "cured" of all their mutant powers and thus sidelined. Jean has become extremely powerful, so powerful in fact that her presence starts to distort the entire movie. If one character is so heavily favored in a fight, and so unpredictable by nature, the entire narrative becomes precarious. As she's a godlike figure, the entire movie could cease to exist in an instant if Jean decided she wanted it that way. To get around this, the movie shows off what she can do early on and then pacifies her for most of the running time, hauling her out when things need to get really intesne so she can kill another character off with her mind.



Obviously, many fans are upset about these dramatic changes, but I can't deny the franchise is invigorated by Ratner's risk-taking, adventurous, free-wheeling enthusiasm. I've always wanted to see an X-Men movie like this since Fox first announced they were going to make X-Men movies. Singer's entries held back. There weren't any huge showdowns between mutants. Usually, you'd get individual scenes with mutants showing off their powers instead of large-scale battle royales such as you'd see in a comic book or cartoon. There weren't any stakes because almost all the main characters had to survive for the next film. There also wasn't any real tension, as Singer would brew up conflicts (like the Cyclops-Wolverine-Jean love triangle) and then let them fizzle out without going anywhere. The movies looked great, had nice action scenes and a lot of the actors got their characters right, but they weren't really exciting in the way they should be. Certainly, neither X-Men or its sequel felt like the "event movies" the marketing would lead you to expect.

Ratner's film does all it can to set this right, giving the fans not just an X-Men movie but four or five X-Men stories wrapped into one 100 minute frontal assault. Unfortunately, the more expansive the action gets, the more the film's strained budget and minimized schedule becomes evident.

Some of the film's new major characters have quite plainly been poorly realized. Vinnie Jones looks ridiculous and embarrassing as Juggernaut, wearing what appears to be a tin foil ball on his head and an odd plastic shoulder pad device that resembles a child's Masters of the Universe Halloween costume. Likewise, Kelsey Grammar's furry blue Beast clashes with all the other characters and environments in the movie. It's not a matter of looking kind of crummy, which the costume does, but of looking like he's stepped into frame out of a completely different movie. Possibly something in which he travels the countryside with a talking donkey.

I'm fairly certain an animated film in which Kelsey Grammar and a donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy wandered around saving princesses would at least have better, snappier dialogue. In a move I've never seen, there's no screenwriters listed on IMDB, but I know Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn at least did a draft. None of the X-Men films thus far have evidenced any sort of flair for the spoken word. Anyone remember that Halle Berry "toad struck by lightning" line from the first movie? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of those. At one point, the President turns to the camera and says "May God have mercy on us." A few scenes later, Beast looks at a bank of monitors and exclaims "Oh my stars and garters." Yikes.

(Whenever I hear that stars and garters expression, which is rarely, I think of that Mr. Show sketch where Bob Odenkirk was in a Christian rock band..."I've invented a praying machine! Oh my stars and garters!")

Not only is the script light on memorable or well-spoken lines, but it also screwed up the logic and continuity from the previous movies. As a random example, we're introduced suddenly to this intense, heated (har!) rivalry between Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford). If that's a hatred that was set up in the previous entry, I must have missed it.



Good lord, I've gone on a while about X-Men: The Last Stand. What a huge dork you must take me for. Sergeant-at-Arms of the Weiner Patrol, reporting for duty. It could be worse. I know a guy who claims that his friends cried actual tears upon reading a comic book in which Wolverine pulls off a move called the "fastball special." Now that's dorky. I just blovaite endlessly about event movies most people forget 10 minutes after they leave the theater, but there are limits to even my lameness.

Here's the short, short version: I kind of liked where Brett Ratner was taking me, I just didn't much like the view once I arrived there. I could have just written that in the first paragraph and saved you all some time.