I Can't Believe I Rented It - X3: The Last Stand

Never in my life had I gone into a movie with such low expectations and still exceeded them. You know things are bad when you can't decide which is worse: X3: The Last Stand or Batman and Robin.

Oh, yeah...it was that bad.

Leading up to the release of X3, I was trying to have high hopes. Anyone who's heard me talk about it knows that I really don't care for Bryan Singer much. As the director of the first two X-Men movies, he created movies that I like a little less everytime I see them. They're not bad movies, but the way I describe them is...they're good individual scenes held together by a shoestring of a plot. So, while not awful, I wouldn't hold them up as shining examples of good movies, either.

But Singer took off to do Superman (which I'm still iffy about), so he was replaced by an indy director, who took off for family related reasons, and that guy was replaced by Brett Ratner of Red Dragon (a movie that I tried repeatedly to watch and still have never seen the end) and Rush Hour (I heart Rush Hour) fame.

And lo, the mudslinging began.

Aintitcool.com (the website that Moviepoopchute.com from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was based on) was in an outrage for months. Ratner was going to kill the franchise, Ratner was a terrible director, Ratner had no business being in charge of the X-Men franchise. He didn't know the history and wasn't concerned with learning any of it. The negativity was especially thick, even amongst the already thick negativity that's usually there. I thought to myself, I'm not gonna get caught up in all that. I thought, this could possibly be the best of the three. Sure, I'm not happy about them doing the Phoenix story, but maybe a good movie will come out of it.

I think I might start listening to the Talkbackers on AICN more often.

How bad was this movie? I don't think my puny human tongue can adequately describe how bad this movie was. My brain can't think on enough levels to even make up a word that's appropriate. I'm not even going to really bitch about the characters much, because people that don't read the comic books don't really care. This simply was a bad movie, regardless of if it had comic book characters were in it or not. (Sad thing is, most people don't care about that either.) I started reading X-Men back in 1989, so I'm pretty familiar with the X-Men. But both Callisto and Psylocke (two major characters in X-Men history) were in the movie and I didn't know one was in the movie until I saw the credits. And she spent most of the movie beating the crap out of Storm. The other I discovered an hour ago, flipping through a magazine from a month ago. Who knew?

In Ratner's defense, he didn't have the proper amount of time to make a good movie, so his back was against the wall from the start. You got negativity from the fans and no support from the studio. Not a good start. Fox was so concerned about beating Superman to the punch that they announced a release date before they had a script, director or a re-signed cast. Everything was last minute for this movie.

Even so, I don't know why or how that means that you should just throw away things like good storytelling and just jam the movie with more stuff than people can actually process. It's impossible to make a two-and-some-change hour movie with 50 main characters and expect it to make sense. You just cannot have as many plotlines running amongst that many characters and have a good movie. You can't kill characters all willy-nilly. They were killing important characters with no build-up at all, yet you had these nameless jokers take up all the screentime? Shouldn't that be in reverse? Oh, yeah...you also can't have it change from day to night in a matter of seconds. That must have been a really long walk off the bridge. You'll know it when you see it. And you'll also wonder if everyone's second mutant power is to have really strong knees.

Now, a lot of people have seen the first two X-Men movies and going by what they've established, Scott Summers and Jean Grey are in love. So why is it that Wolverine is the one doing all the crying for Jean? Wouldn't it have made more sense for Cyclops to be doing that? Who cares if Wolverine is more popular...you gotta go where the story takes you. And Wolverine had never professed any love for Jean up to that point. He just wanted the booty. And we all knew that.

In fact, now that I think about it, I don't even remember them interacting at all in the second movie. How much could he possibly have been in love? They just met in the last movie! They had, what...two moments together? Then, you got Storm over here... Listen: I don't care how big of a name Halle is, she was never right for this part. They just picked the first black actress who came to mind. What, was Gabrielle Union's phone disconnected that day? No, she might not be the best choice, but she would have been better than Halle Berry. And she's completely given up on trying to sound like she might be from somewhere outside of America. Didn't even try this time.

They got the Beast in there...something they really could have done without. They did a good job on him, though, considering the circumstances. He was just a half-way important character, depending on which plotline was the focus.

Angel fits into the tier of characters who were just in the movie to be in the movie, which was most of them. Like Phoenix. Or Juggernaut. Or Professor X, for that matter. The only major characters in this movie were Magneto and Wolverine and that's bad considering how much they were trying to put into it. It's also bad considering that these two characters can't really fight each other. Well, they can fight, but all that would happen is Wolverine and his metal skeleton would keep getting thrown into shit, because Magneto...well, controls metal.

It was almost like it was a really bad pilot for a show, because you can already see what's coming next: A Wolverine franchise, a Magneto movie is also in the works, and because they can't resist it....a New Mutants or Generation X movie. Oh, bet on it.

Overall, I really hoped for the best with this one. Then, I went into it with low expectations and was still disappointed. They tried to cram three movies into one, tried to distract fans with comic book moments and situations, threw a whole bunch of stuff at the screen, because they had no idea what else to do. They actually forgot to follow up on stuff until the end of the movie. And to rub salt in the wound, the endings...well, I'll just say that it's almost like they knew they fucked up.

It's not a bad movie because I like the comic books so much, it's a bad movie because it's a bad movie. It would have been bad regardless of the characters. It could have been so much more. Talk about a missed opportunity.