THE LAST STAND
Movie Reviews
Probably the best superhero movie ever made came out a couple years ago. Spider-Man 2 was big, loud, and action-packed, but it was always telling a relevant, surprisingly realistic story about people who, despite their super-humanness, felt authentic.
I mention all that because X-Men: The Last Stand, the latest in the X-Men franchise, tries its hardest to do it too, but somehow, despite its super-humanness, it fails.
I blame the film's incompetence on its writers, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, and its director, Brett Ratner, all of whom are hacks in their area. Kinberg and Penn had nearly no experience with the X-Men films, and in hearing their dialog on screen, it seems like they have no experience in writing either. We get lines like Well then God help us and The best defense is a good offense! And Brett Ratner has only one film under his belt to consider: Rush Hour. His repertoire also includes the music video for These Boots Were Made for Walkin with Jessica Simpson.
All of them faced the horrible responsibility of replacing men who were vastly more talented than them.
In The Last Stand, the mutants with the X-gene face a hard decision. A company in San Francisco has developed what theyve called the cure for mutants. Its derived from a small mutant boy whose powers are so powerful that his mere presence strips any other mutant of his or her powers.
Mutants around the country are up in arms about this new cure. Dr. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) opposes it because he feels mutants need to embrace their powers as a gift that helps them contribute to society. Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his army of hostile mutants are opposed because they feel they are the cure. Along the way, Magneto campaigns and gathers up handfuls of new mutants, most of which dont really contribute to the story enough for us to really appreciate or care about their powers. In fact, most of the movie consists of tiny instances outside the plot that do nothing other than demonstrate the powers of characters we already knew from the previous two movies.
No where The Last Stand comes closest to success is in relevance. Most of the topics discussed in the film can easily be paralleled to timely debates of today: abortion, gay rights, war, and so on. But the film is so maddeningly cartoony in its approach that none of my fascination made it past the half hour mark.
The big problem with The Last Stand is that it cannot see the big picture. The long term. The future. It treats its characters much like Magneto treats his unimportant followers: pawns in a chess game. Consider the death toll in this film, and not only that, consider who dies. We have major, contributing characters being killed off without the dignity of a proper cinematic death.
In watching a film like The Last Stand, one looks for something I call the wow factor. Was I wowed? Which parts wowed me? The film tries desperately to be revelatory and awing, but it has no wow factor. Every time it comes to the brink of wow, someone chimes in with dialog. And, well, dont make me repeat myself. **