Common Sense

(Ed. note: This review contains spoilers. In fact, it is almost nothing but spoilers. I have warned you.)

X-Men: The Last Stand isn’t as bad as all that, but I am glad I only had to pay the matinee price for the one o’clock show.

Nobodygirl and I had to sit and wait for quite a long time and sit through quite a few crappy previews before the movie started. If these previews are any indication, the only good movie coming out in the next month is The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (hot asian girls galore!).

The movie starts off interestingly enough. Xavier and Magneto are both going to visit a young Jean Grey some 20 years ago. Xavier’s goal is to get her to come to his new school for the gifted. Jean displays an incredible amount of power, setting the stage for some future events. My favorite thing about this scene is how both Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen look 20 years younger. I don’t know if it was make up or digital effects, but whoever did that, kudos to you.

We skip forward 10 years to find a young Angel trying to cut off his wings before his father sees them. That sets the stage for the other storyline in this movie, the eventual “cure” that supresses the mutant gene and makes even hairy, abnormal looking mutants like The Beast, Dr. Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), into a normal-looking human.

That’s sort of the problem throughout this movie. It has two story arcs that keep competing for dominance. The Phoenix Storyline and the Cure Storyline were stand-alone arcs in the comics and would have been enough plot for one movie. Together, they keep the pace way too high and the 97 minute runtime isn’t nearly enough to give them both justice.

Phoenix seems to be what suffers the most. Just when that part of the plot is emerging, Jean seems to get tamped down in favor of continuing on the other story. The Phoenix is supposed to be this being of limitless power, but she ends up just standing around watching everything instead of participating.

Unless she’s killing loved ones or important characters.

The way Cyclops (James Marsden) gets offed in the first 15 minutes just sort of took me aback. His character was never really developed through the first two films, so it wasn’t as though I was going to grieve for him. But such a strong character in the comic series should at least be given some kind of dignified death. We don’t even see it on camera.

The same with Charles Xavier. I just couldn’t see how you could kill off the character that the movies and the comics were named after. Yet, they do. He gets immolated and torn into a million pieces by Jean because he wants to control her and her awesome power.

I detected a harshness in his character towards Wolverine that was really unwarranted. There was really a lot of characterization here that I didn’t think was needed and I wasn’t really able to fully understand what Xavier’s objectives or goals were. The government develops and weaponizes a “cure” to eradicate mutations and Xavier wants to keep that going. Magneto sees the fulfilling of his prophecies of doom and is prepared to act with force of his own. I was really more able to empathize with Magneto here.

Throughout this, several mutants we know fall by the wayside. Mystique is shot by the weaponized cure when she takes the shot intended for Magneto and loses her mutant abilities. Magneto turns his back on her, telling her that “You’re no longer one of us.”

Rogue (Anna Paquin) decides she cannot stand the thought she will never be able to touch another person and sees her boyfriend Bobby (Shawn Ashmore) becoming more close to Kitty (Ellen Page) the girl who can walk through walls. She takes the cure and there is a very tender moment when they hold hands for the first time. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he says.

“I know. It’s what I wanted,” she replies.

By the way, I predict that Ellen Page will be the next Jessica Alba. She’s that hot.

The CGI effects for the Golden Gate Bridge scene were top-notch. Kuods to those guys for doing something right when it would have been easier to just slap something together and leave for lunch.

Wolverine finally learns teamwork and is therefore able to sneak one by Magneto. McCoy sticks him with several vials of the “cure” making him human; the thing he most hates. And he also has to deal with Phoenix.

Storm (Halle Berry) accepts the role of leader of the X-Men.

McCoy becomes US Ambassador to the UN.

Life moves on.

The movie ends with Magneto sitting in a park in San Francisco. Presumably his televised threats to all humanity haven’t made him more recognizable. He’s sitting at a chess table. He holds out his towards a pewter chess piece. It wiggles slightly. And that’s how it ends.

The franchise that ends with an opening for 10 more sequels.

Here is the real kicker, though. For those who stay and sit through all of the credits, you get a special reward. I bet Chad Conine with his tickets to last night’s special preview didn’t stay to see this. In the scene we see what looks to be an old man with a long beard in a hospital bed. In walks Moira McTaggert, the doctor friend of Charles Xavier. We hear a familiar voice, “Hello, Moira.”

She turns pale and whispers, “Charles.”

Because a cure that doesn’t really cure isn’t enough, we get a man who has been blown to bits ending up in a hospital bed half a world away. F-ing Fox studios. And f-ing Chad.

These two trick endings really soured me on this whole movie. I could have stood what was thrown at us by Brett Ratner if it had not been for that. Against my better judgement, though, I’m giving it three out of five Xs.

Addendum: It took me a couple of extra hours, but I finally realized how Xavier could still be alive. At the begining of the movie, he is talking about ethical dilemmas for mutants and he shows them a file video of a man with no higher brain functions. He transferred his essence, the things that made him Charles Xavier, telepathically to this man. Of course, he would now be human as well.

I can’t believe I didn’t catch that. It must be the lack of sleep.