Hero Go Home

We’ve arrived at the final film (so far) in the X-Men series, X-Men: First Class. This was apparently first contemplated as another X-Men Origins movie, like that Wolverine travesty, this time focusing on Magneto. But it was expanded to include a young Charles Xavier, as well as the origin of the X-Men concept.

So this is in essence a prequel to the first X-Men feature. However, director Matthew Vaughn–who had previously been set to direct X-Men: The Last Stand, but dropped out because of the too-tight schedule–didn’t want to be straitjacketed by existing continuity, so while the film sets up many elements that appeared in the earlier films, it is also incompatible with their continuity in some important ways.

The film establishes itself as of a piece with the other films in its very first scene, which is a replay of the opening scene from the first X-Men movie (though not quite a shot-for-shot remake)–Jewish kid separated from family at concentration camp, bends a metal gate in an attempt to get back to his mother, knocked out by a rifle buttstroke to the head.

We then jump across the pond to a mansion in Westchester, New York, where a young Charlie Xavier confronts something in the kitchen posing as his mother. And that something is…

A young blue girl named Raven. Charles is excited to have someone else with abilities around, so he convinces Raven that she no longer has to steal. She can stay with Charles as long as she wants.

Meanwhile, back at the camp, we see young Erik Lensherr standing before Kevin Bacon as a bespectacled researcher. Though he speaks German and orders the Nazis around, he claims not to be one of them. He isn’t interested in Aryan purity, but the mutant genetics that lead to power like Erik’s.

He offers Erik chocolate if he can move a coin, but gets no results after a few moments of ridiculous pantomiming. So he has Erik’s mother brought in and threatens to shoot her if the coin does not move. When the coin remains unbudged, Erik’s mother is killed. In his grief and anger, Erik then begins to destroy everything made of metal in a frenzy of rage.

And here, even before the opening credits, we see the movie beginning to go off the tracks. That bit with kid Xavier and kid Mystique signals that this movie won’t be dovetailing perfectly with the other films, given that Mystique has never evidenced the slightest relationship with Xavier before, let alone being his oldest childhood friend.

And the bit with the young Magneto is all too reminiscent of the opening silliness of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which a kid has to act out a killer rage. Erik screams for a solid 45 seconds, and I don’t believe it for one of them. Especially when he destroys a bell, a filing cabinet, a room full of metal lab tables and surgical equipment, and the skulls of two helmeted Nazis, but somehow fails to lash out at the guy who just shot his mother. There are plot-related reasons for his failing to do so, but it’s a glaring omission that starts things out on the wrong foot.

Then titles, and the stupid young Erik is almost instantly forgotten as we see Michael Fassbender as Erik grown up, sitting in a Geneva hotel room, levitating the coin given to him by Kevin Bacon’s character as he contemplates a map showing how he has tracked the man down across the world. It’s now 1962, and between Fassbender’s intensity and the pulsing revenge music composed by Henry Jackman, it looks like the movie is going to leave the silliness behind.

But we can’t really trust that, can we, given that someone decided to leave that previous scene in untouched?

Time to check in on our other main players, Charles and Raven. Charles is now attending Oxford University and working on his thesis on genetic mutation, although he seems mainly concerned with using his genetic knowledge and telepathic powers to hit on hot chicks in the pub, even managing to work the word “groovy” into his genetics riff.

James McAvoy is smarmy, yet charming, as the adult Xavier (two words you would never think to associate with Patrick Stewart’s version of the character), and Jennifer Lawrence as Raven obviously has a crush on him.

It’s never explained how Raven has stayed with him all these years. His parents never noticed there was another kid living in the house? Like Erik’s failure to kill the still-unnamed Kevin Bacon character, it’s vital to the plot,  but lacking a good explanation, they apparently just decided to make it a fait accompli. It doesn’t matter how it happened, just that it happened. But it’s tickling that part of my brain that says, “I would feel happier and trust this movie more if it made some damn sense.”

Back in Switzerland, Erik tortures a Swiss banker to find someone named Klaus Schmidt (Kevin Bacon, apparently).

The scene plays really well. There are some cool camera compositions using reflections in a bar of gold, Fassbender is mesmerizing, and the guy playing the banker gives a really grotesque performance as a guy having a metal filling ripped magnetically from his mouth. It’s like Vaughn half-assed the parts of the story that bored him, and is trying to compensate by amping up the cool parts. Can he sustain that for a whole movie? We’ll see.

Welcome to Las Vegas! A couple of C.I.A. agents are scoping out a casino where something called the Hellfire Club (an organization of mutants that played a central role in the “Dark Phoenix” saga in the comics) is attracting a lot of very high rollers, including a colonel in the Air Force. When a bevy of women in just their underwear arrive, the female agent (played by Rose Byrne) joins them to try to get a closer look at things inside. Brave, walking into the lion’s den virtually naked, and also fan service.

The colonel is met by a scantily-clad woman named Emma Frost (January Jones from Mad Men) who works for someone named Sebastian Shaw. She takes the colonel to a booth with a velvet curtain. When the agent tries to follow, the booth is empty. But this scene manages a really nice faux-60’s flavor: the saturated colors, the men in tuxes, Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon singing “Palisades Park, and the spinning booth gag that appeared in at least one Bond movie (Live and Let Die, I think, but also maybe the 60’s spoof Casino Royale).

The girl peers through a crack into another secret room, where Colonel Hendry is threatened by Sebastian Shaw, who turns out to be Klaus Schmidt, only looking younger and groovier, minus spectacles and mustache and now wearing a velvet jacket. Shaw wants U.S. nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey and intimidates Hendry with a trio of mutants, including Frost (a different White Queen than the one from Wolverine, but still able to turn to diamond, as well as being a telepath), Azazel (a red-skinned teleporter), and a dude who can conjure whirlwinds.

The agent makes her way out and calls her boss, only to be told that Hendry is 3000 miles away, recommending that U.S. nuclear missiles be stationed in Turkey.

Oh, and he calls her “MacTaggart,” as in Moira MacTaggart, last seen in comics and X-Men: The Last Stand as a Scottish genetics researcher and former flame of Xavier’s. Once again, the X-series is doing this weird cherry-picking mix-and-match, taking disparate characters and mashing them together, using an established character’s name without any of that character’s identifying details, in ways that make it not only incompatible with the comics, but also with the other films in the series. I don’t mind reimagining, but the haphazard nature of it grates on me. Why couldn’t they just make a new character rather than recycling Moira’s name?

And so, while Fassbender is in Argentina, killing more Nazis in his quest for Klaus Schmidt…

Moira is seeking an expert in genetic mutation and finds Charles, celebrating his graduation by sucking down a yard of beer and flirting drunkenly with her. But he sobers quickly when he reads her mind and sees the images of Azazel and the White Queen.

In Miami, Colonel Hendry tries to bluff his way off of Shaw’s yacht with a grenade. But Shaw absorbs the explosion and uses the absorbed energy to kill Hendry.

Which brings up a question which is never answered: was Shaw a mutant all along, or did he somehow mutate himself after studying Erik (and perhaps other mutants)? I don’t think the filmmakers had a good answer to that question, and obviously now, the reason that Erik never attacked Shaw/Schmidt in that early scene becomes apparent: if he was a mutant, it would spoil this big reveal, and if he wasn’t, he would die and end the story. Either way, plot ruined.

At CIA HQ in Langley, Xavier and Moira meet with some muckety-mucks including Agent Stryker (the guy in the middle), who will go on to become Colonel Stryker, villain of both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X2. Charles reveals his telepathy, but no one believes him until Raven reveals her shapeshifting ability.

And why is Raven even in this meeting? Because she has to be to further the plot. I’m starting to get seriously tired of this movie’s continued failures to address significant plot holes, as if ignoring them makes them not be there. Come on, movie, you’re not even trying!

So Charles and Raven are entrusted to the dude in black back there, Oliver Platt. His character is never named, but I’m thinking he must be Fred Duncan from X-Men: Children of the Atom. Moira convinces Charles that they must go after Shaw immediately, so Charles compels Duncan to go along.

And of course, because this is a movie, they get there at the same time as Erik, who trashes Shaw’s yacht with the anchor chain in a pretty spectacular moment.

But Shaw and his compatriots escape on a submarine launched from the bottom of the yacht, and Erik is not strong enough to stop it. Instead, he is dragged helplessly behind until Charles dives into the water, grabs him, and telepathically convinces him to let go. They will have to regroup and try again.

And that’s where we’ll leave it until next week. So far, I’m liking the movie’s style even though it lacks substance, and I really like MacAvoy and Fassbender in the lead roles.

See you next week.

Okay, it’s technically not Monday, but this has been a busy week. We are concluding our look back at X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the fourth film in the series.

I have noted in the past, about films like Superman III and even X-Men: The Last Stand, that they don’t necessarily start out bad. For its first half, Superman III is a weak, but serviceable comedy with some good superhero special effects and a charming romance between Clark Kent and Lana Lang. It turns bad about halfway through and never recovers. X-Men: The Last Stand has a weak script with too many plots fighting for screen time, but it also presents some interesting ethical dilemmas in its first half.

XO: Wolverine starts with that ludicrous image of the boy roaring at the ceiling, and though it presents some intriguing action moments, there’s never a real story.

Worse, like its predecessor, it fills up with characters whose names we barely learn, who are supposed to be characters from the comics. If you don’t come into the movie already a fan of the comics, the movie never gives you a reason to be interested in them. Most of their superhero names are never even spoken; you never hear the words Wraith, Cyclops, Sabertooth, Silver Fox.

But even though the movie doesn’t start out good, it still manages to get worse halfway through. So let’s begin our descent into the spiral of stupidity. When we left off, Logan–driven by the need to get revenge on half-brother Victor for the death of his girlfriend–had submitted to a procedure by Colonel William Stryker to fuse his bones with the indestructible alloy adamantium. The procedure was a success.

But then Logan heard Stryker plotting to erase his memory, so he broke free and escaped, jumping naked off a waterfall into Alkali Lake. Stryker sends Agent Zero after Logan.

Later, an elderly farm couple are tooling down the road when they spot a naked fellow by the side of the road.

No, not him. Him, now hiding out in the barn…

The elderly couple take Logan in, give him clothes (their dead son’s) and a meal and a place to sleep. And in return, Logan slashes up their bathroom with these.

The claws have always been problematic in the series. There are occasional scenes where the CG claws extending from his fist don’t look real. But for some reason, in this scene, they’ve inserted CGI claws into this shot that really didn’t need them; they could have used a practical prop which wouldn’t have looked nearly this cartoony. You really have to see them in motion to get how bad and distracting this shot is.

The next morning, Logan is preparing to leave, when Zero arrives and kills the kindly old couple whose names we never learned. It’s shocking enough in its way, although the effect is diluted by the fact that these two people are entirely too good to be true, taking Logan in without the slightest curiosity about who he is or how he ended up naked in their barn or how he sliced their cast iron bathroom sink in two.

Logan has a chase scene/action sequence against Agent Zero in a helicopter, as well as two Humvees, reasonably well put together and featuring Logan learning to use his claws for things like this emergency Bat-turn.

But there are two big problems with this scene. Number one, Wolverine never really faces off against Zero, who showed himself to be a formidably tough guy in the previous scene with the team. After he kills the old couple with sniper shots, Zero jumps into the helicopter and orders the soldiers to attack. Which leads to problem number two: the soldiers attack with ordinary bullets, which would have had trouble killing Logan before his upgrade, and that’s only if they managed to hit him, which they never do.

So Logan kills them all, and then tells Stryker over the radio that he’s going to hunt down Victor and then kill Stryker. Which is when one of the scientists on the project mentions to Stryker that only adamantium bullets can pierce Wolverine’s adamantium skull, and he just happens to have a revolver with six adamantium cartridges ready. Gee, you might have mentioned that before your number-one ace, freakily-accurate mutant sniper got himself de-lifed.

This is what they call an idiot plot, boys and girls. Stryker has come up with an adamantium-bonding process he wants to use to create the ultimate super-soldier (we’ll get to him in a bit), but decides to test it first on someone expendable. So he uses Logan, who hates Stryker and everything he stands for, without wondering for even a second if it might not be a bad idea to make his worst enemy into an indestructible murder machine. Because the whole plot depends on it. The plot can only progress because everyone in it is a total moron. Idiot plot: write it down, remember it.

Logan then tracks down former teammate John (identified in the credits, but never on-screen, as Wraith) in his quest to find Victor. John (played by will.i.am of the Black-Eyed Peas) says that former teammate Fred Dukes might know where Victor is, but warns Logan that Dukes has put on a little weight since their days together. And of course, since Dukes is the name of The Blob, a little weight is an understatement.

They box for the information, and after a little “Boom Boom Pow,” Dukes tells Logan that Victor is probably with Stryker on the island. The two work together hunting down mutants, taking them to the island and doing experiments on them.

And at just that moment, more or less, Victor is doing just that, hunting down a young mutant high schooler named Bart, er Scott Summers.

There’s a chase between Scott and Victor’s digital stunt double leaping jerkily down the halls. Scott is tackled, his glasses get knocked off, and we get a pretty impressive Cyclops moment, just before he’s captured.

Meanwhile, Dukes is telling Logan that he doesn’t know where the island is, but there was one cat who escaped: a guy they called Gambit. So Logan and John head to New Orleans, where they find Gambit in a casino.

You would think that a movie which included both John Carter and Dejah Thoris would be better than this, wouldn’t you? Logan approaches Gambit and does a very bad job of coaxing information from him, while outside, John gets into a fight with Victor. And once again, this movie starts wasting my time.

Because  their battle mostly consists of John teleporting around Victor and punching him a lot. But John and Victor were teammates for years; John would have known that Victor is not only super-tough, but also regenerates. Punching just won’t cut it. So no matter how cool the teleporting effect which briefly reveals Wraith’s skeleton is…

Dramatically it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Because not only does the audience know that John’s attacks are useless, they know that John knows. Which means that the filmmakers are lazily checking the box marked “Sabretooth kills Wraith” without putting even a second’s thought into making this an interesting or exciting scene on its own merits.

And that statement applies to pretty much the entire second half of the film!

At just the moment that Victor is extracting John’s DNA, Logan gets blown out the back wall of the casino by Gambit’s exploding card trick. So now Victor and Logan get into a fight, which is broken up by Gambit, because get this, Gambit–who is desperate not to go back to the island–instead of running away, attacks Logan, then jumps around a little, and then tries to run away.

Which once again makes no damn sense, but had to happen to allow Victor to escape and make sure Logan could grab Gambit to take him to the island.  Turns out, the super-secret mutant base is on Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Gambit flies Logan there in a little two-seater plane, and Logan jumps out once he’s close. Of course, we’ve already been shown how much heavier Logan is with metal bones, which means Logan will have to walk his way to the island along the riverbed, which brings up the question: Logan can regenerate wounds, but can he drown? Or say, not die, but pass out indefinitely from lack of oxygen?

Doesn’t matter, because next thing we know, he’s magically on the island, where Stryker is preparing the next step in his mutant program: a mutant designated Weapon 11 (Logan was Weapon X, or 10).

We don’t get a good look at his face, but his mouth has been stitched shut and adamantium fused into his skeleton like Logan’s. And he has apparently had other stolen mutant powers granted to him; Stryker calls him “the dead pool.”

And Stryker has one more surprise for Logan: Kayla’s not dead. In the seriously stupidest twist in this stupid, stupid movie, Kayla was merely drugged to simulate death and splashed with blood rather than killed by Sabretooth’s claws, which you’d think veteran-of-multiple-wars Logan might have noticed. But instead of attempting some last ditch first aid, or calling in authorities and making arrangements for burial or any of that, he apparently just screamed and left her body to rot by the side of the road and never noticed she had no actual wounds.

This kind of thing happens in movies all the time, the idea that a character sort of ceases to exist in the time between one scene ending and the next beginning, so they never notice the obvious thing that they certainly would have were they given more than three seconds of screen time to examine. But this is as bad an example as I have ever seen in my 50 years.

So Logan breaks up with Kayla and leaves, and then Victor shows up, demanding that Stryker give him the same adamantium treatment Logan got. But Stryker says Victor wouldn’t survive it, so Victor attacks Kayla which brings Logan back in another ridiculous “angry” pose.

Seriously, I like Jackman, but there were so many better ways to make Wolverine’s “berserker rage” play on screen. It’s such a wasted opportunity. You want to see a real berserker rage that makes the character suddenly a little scary? Watch Ed Norton beat the crap out of that pretty blond guy in Fight Club. That’s what this movie needed.

So Logan and Victor have their big final fight, which doesn’t last very long. With Wolverine’s new enhancements, Victor is no match for him. Logan has Victor pinned to the ground, waiting for the death blow, when Kayla stops him, telling him he’s not an animal. and I get that they’ve been trying to make that a theme over the whole film, but it’s so ham-fisted that it has no impact.

Anyway, Logan gives Victor an adamnatium knock-out punch, then he and Kayla go to free the young mutants held prisoner while Stryker orders the not-quite-finished Weapon 11 to be activated. And we get another of these Easter Egg scenes which were cool in the first couple of movies, but in the latter pair have basically substituted for dramatic coherence. In the holding cells, we find Cyclops and Banshee and Quicksilver and a teenage Toad and Kayla’s sister, the White Queen, not named Emma Frost (actually not named at all, per usual).

Wolverine cuts open their cells and they all attempt to escape, but their way is blocked by Deadpool, who turns out to be loudmouth Wade, Logan’s former teammate.

He actually looks pretty badass with no mouth and those sword blades extending from his hands. I guess there were fans who were upset by this movie’s portrayal of Deadpool and Gambit, but I had pretty much stopped reading the X-line by the time they were introduced, so I know nothing about them except that I hated Gambit’s faux-Creole accent on the 90’s cartoon.

So Wolverine sends the kids and Kayla to find another exit while he stays to fight Deadpool, and they seem pretty evenly matched. Deadpool’s blades are a match for Logan’s and he has the same healing ability, so this could be a pretty long fight.

Kayla and the kids, meanwhile, run into some armed guards on their way, but with a bit of teamwork between the diamond-skinned White Queen and a blindfolded Cyclops, the guards are taken care of. Kayla tells her sister to lead the kids to safety while she stays behind to see to Logan. Once the kids are gone, we realize Kayla has suffered a bullet wound in her gut.

Wolverine runs away from Deadpool and climbs up one of the reactor towers. Deadpool calmly teleports up there next to him and goes on the attack, but he is interrupted by Victor, who saves Logan from falling into the reactor. “Nobody kills you but me.”

Now the two brothers fight back to back as Deadpool attacks them with incredible speed, teleporting in and out between attacks. But finally Victor gets hold of him and Logan stabs him, before Deadpool knocks them down and teleports to the other side of the tower.

Where he unleashes his final weapon: Cyclops’s eyebeams. He blasts Logan, who blocks the beams with his claws (?) while Victor runs around and tackles him. Deadpool pins Victor to the ground and blasts him into it, which is when Logan uses his now red-hot claws to cut Deadpool’s head off. Deadpool falls into the tower, eyebeams still blasting from his severed head.

Okay, that is ludicrously over the top, which is exactly what makes it pretty cool. Victor declares their business is not over and runs away, and Logan discovers a wounded Kayla. Before he can get her to the hospital, Stryker appears and shoots him with the adamantium pistol. As Wolverine charges him, Stryker puts two bullets into his forehead. And what happens next is not a surprise, both because we know from the later movies that he lost his memory, and because we’ve been told a few scenes ago that the bullets will not kill him, but make him lose his memory.

But before Wolverine wakes back up, Stryker tries to kill Kayla. However, she has the power to command people with a touch, and after a little lip service to the insipid “I won’t kill you because then I’d be no better than you” trope, she sends him walking until his “feet bleed.”

Meanwhile, the kids have been running through secret tunnels, following the directions of blindfolded Scott who is getting weird messages in his brain. And when they come out the other end, they find a helicopter and a kindly bald man who GYAAAHHH!

That’s even worse than the facial smoothing at the beginning of X-Men: The Last Stand. And seriously, why? They managed to recast all the other parts who would recur from the other films: Cyclops, Stryker, Sabretooth, even Toad. Why pull this ridiculous digital stunt at the end of a movie that has already egregiously exceeded its ridiculosity quotient?

Oh, well, it’s just the one shot. Wolverine comes to, and Gambit is there to tell him that his name is Logan, just like his dogtags say. And Kayla’s dead body is there, but Logan no longer knows who she is, so he closes her eyes and leaves her there as emergency crews are arriving.

And then it’s all over but the post-credit stinger, where Deadpool’s severed head opens its eyes and shushes (with his now functional mouth) the cries of a supposedly astounded and terrified audience. Maybe he’ll be back in the upcoming sequel.

And that’s it. Although there are moments of real spectacle, and the effects are mostly okay (excepting Nightmare Fuel Xavier and cartoon claws),  the movie is an utter failure on the storytelling level. It completely abandons its storytelling responsibilities, becoming a parade of idiot characters and half-thought-through bad ideas papered over with callbacks to the comics in the hopes of keeping the fanboys happy. Which might have worked, if they hadn’t, you know, changed almost everything from the comics.

Next week: back to the 60’s with X-Men: First Class.

We have somehow survived to the final segment of X-Men: The Last Stand. And I would like to stop being angry at the movie long enough to say that I understand where a lot of these problems are coming from.

This was not an easy project to make. Bryan Singer, the director of the first two installments of the series, was supposed to direct this one too, but he bailed after Warner’s waved Superman Returns in front of him like Don Ameche enticing Eddie Murphy in Trading Places by saying, “Look! Liquor!”

Their second choice, Matthew Vaughn, did a lot of development and casting, but ultimately left, supposedly because he didn’t think he could deliver a quality product on the short deadline Fox had given him. Which, ironically, forced them to find another director, who had to deliver on an even shorter deadline. And the poor patsy who wasn’t afraid to take that bullet was apparently Brett Ratner.

Because Hollywood is the land where a director can say on a commentary track, with absolutely no irony, “I read the script and loved it. I thought it was just perfect. So I said I would take the job, and then spent six weeks rewriting.”

Unfortunately, the more hands you have in a script, the more likely it is that scenes and lines and moments will become divorced from their intent. The script stops making sense. You end up with orphaned characters like James Madrox, the Multiple Man, who is introduced by name midway through the movie, gets two lines total, and has only one even semi-interesting moment.

While on the other side of the coin, you have Dania Ramirez, who plays Callisto (as you would know if you read the credits on IMDB), who seems to play a pretty significant part early, but who is never named and who gets lost in the crowd by the time we get to the final confrontation on Alcatraz.

Which we’re getting to right now. Magneto and his posse stand on the shore in San Francisco, looking across the bay at Worthington Labs. There’s this weird throwaway scene with Magneto and Callisto and Juggernaut that looks like they all shot their parts on bluescreen on different days, because they’re not even looking at each other.

Meanwhile, Wolverine shows up at the school, which incidentally, the house they used for the X-Mansion…

Is also the same house used as Lex Luthor’s mansion on Smallville.

So anyway, Wolverine rallies the troops, which consist of the same team that was in the Danger Room at the beginning, minus Rogue, plus Beast. When Iceman mentions that there are only six of them versus Magneto’s army, Wolverine gives a speech that’s supposed to be stirring, only it doesn’t really work. He mentions that not only are they outnumbered, but they’ve lost their biggest power hitters, but he is not going to see the dreams of Scott and the Professor die.

It might be more meaningful if Scott hadn’t been reduced to a shambling wreck in this episode, or if the Professor weren’t a lying liar who messed with people’s minds as he saw fit, but hey…

So they take off in the X-Jet, and as they’re all lost in thoughts of their own mortality, Bobby turns to look at Kitty, with whom he’s had this sort-of forbidden romance building all movie. And as the camera zooms in on her face (and although Ellen Page is really cute, she looks really vapid and braindead in this shot, staring slack-jawed at nothing), we think there might be a moment of resolution or development in their story arc.

But no, there are just a couple more random close-ups and then we’re back in San Francisco, where Magneto, instead of putting everyone in cars or a big boat and flying them to the island, decides to rip up the Golden Gate Bridge and use it.

Which is pretty cool, but not only would something smaller be better tactically, the coolness is undercut by the obvious soundstage set they use for shots on the bridge. And undercut even worse when they arrive at the island. Look at that shot of the flying bridge; it’s happening in daylight. The sun is setting, but it’s bright out.

The bridge lands at Alcatraz as the last rays of the sun illuminate Magneto. And then he turns around and strides off the end of the bridge, and we’ve hit Ed Wood territory. It’s not just night, it’s instant full dark, with lots of the abandoned cars on the bridge having suddenly turned their headlights on and searchlights waving around on the island, where seconds ago there were no lights on. I’m not one to quibble at small continuity errors, like when the level in someone’s drink changes between cuts, but this is just crazy awful.

Magneto sends in his army of gang kids first, who get chopped up by the Army’s “cure weapons.” And once again, for someone whose chief motivation seems to be the good of all mutantkind, he seems awfully happy to have those kids lose their powers. But I guess that’s why he’s a villain.

Magneto can’t affect their plastic weapons, so he calls on someone called “Arclight.” Oh, it’s the butch chick…

I find this character disturbing. Not just the angry androgynousness, but the way she lurks scowling in the background and keeps getting close-ups as if we’re supposed to find her interesting when she never does anything. And even here, her power is supposed to be shockwaves produced when she claps her hands, but there’s barely a sound effect. She just claps with this dainty little grunt and stuff falls apart. It feels like I’m watching a rough cut that hasn’t had the effects finalized yet. And I’m really unhappy that the filmmakers have somehow found a way to make a woman in fishnet completely non-erotic.

Which is when the X-Men arrive and Beast gets to say his comic-book catchphrase, “Oh my stars and garters,” because that’s what this movie has been missing–the goofy Beast from the mid-70’s Avengers comics. The X-Men land their invisible jet and make their showy entrances, and I guess I’m supposed to be impressed when the six of them line up in front of about 100 enemy mutants and Wolverine says, “Hold this line!” but seriously, the only thing that can make it more ridiculous is when Kitty then nods stoically–Kitty Pryde, whose only superpower is to become immaterial, so stuff passes through her.

Seriously, at this point, it’s so bad that I’m starting to wonder if, like Frank Miller’s DK2, Ratner’s really just making fun of me by making something so awful.

And now the fight starts, and even though they try to make it impressive, giving Beast lots of wire-stunts, it becomes apparent that “Hold this line!” means “Beat up two guys while a dozen run past you.” But it doesn’t matter, because they’re all extras and will never accomplish anything. Juggernaut runs forward to grab the boy inside, and Kitty volunteers to stop him, because she’s doing so well at holding the line.

And actually, with the exception of Vinnie Jones’s silly line, “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” this is a pretty good little action scene, with Kitty being totally outmuscled, but managing to out-think her opponent.

Wolverine and Beast get their obligatory moment of bonding through violence (although Kelsey Grammer ends up totally slipping into Frasier Crane mode for this scene), and meanwhile, the gang has managed to grab Warren Worthington II and throw him off the roof, which is when Angel swoops in to save his dad and then fly away. My God, it’s like a whole movie full of cameos. There are so many characters and arcs that are never developed, it’s like they wrote the screenplay on Twitter.

Magneto has finally had enough, so he decides to end things by flinging cars off the bridge  at the building, while Pyro sets them on fire in mid-air. And once again, it’s something that looks impressive but doesn’t really seem to accomplish anything. Everyone takes cover and the cars don’t do any really effective damage.

But they do make the courtyard look like the Danger Room simulation from the beginning of the film, which is the whole point. Wolverine comes up with a plan that will require teamwork from everybody: first, Storm provides fog cover, while Bobby and Pyro finally get their fire/ice duel.

And fire, of course, totally beats ice, at least until Bobby conveniently levels up and turns to ice, smothering Pyro’s flames and head-butting him into unconsciousness.

So, stupid, but points for the comic book coolness, I guess. Wolverine and Colossus repeat their fastball special, but Magneto, of course, stops Wolverine cold. Which is when Beast jumps him from behind and stabs him with a broken clip of cure needles.

Which is clever and a nice touch of irony for such a raging bigot, except for one thing: Jean. Not only is she telepathic, so she could have anticipated the plan, but she was standing far enough behind Magneto that she could have seen and stopped the Beast.

But Jean is so powerful that she’s a storybreaker, which is why they’ve had the most powerful character in the film stand around doing nothing for twenty minutes now; she’s had to wait until it’s her plot’s turn. Which is another symptom of the incredible hurry they put the movie together under, I guess. Integrating the two plotlines would have taken more thought, therefore more time, and made everything more complex. But you can feel the by-the-numbers artificiality of everything when people like Jean and Pyro are standing around, idly waiting their turns for their plots to resolve.

Wolverine tells her it’s all over, but at just that moment, reinforcements arrive and fire a salvo of cure needles at her. Which causes her to snap and begin vaporizing everyone and everything on the island, while her hair blows wild, backlit by flames to make a vaguely Phoenix-like corona.

Dozens of soldiers and mutant extras die, including the gang kids who come running out of the building, but the featured players manage to escape, including Magneto. At least Ian McKellen has the good sense to look embarrassed when he delivers the line, “What have I done?”

Wolverine moves toward Jean, regenerating as she boils off chunks of his skin, until he’s standing face-to-face with her. And she must really want to die, because we know from previous experience (Nightcrawler’s teleporting in X2, Cyclops’s eyebeams in this film) that she can turn off other mutants’ powers when she wants to. But she lets Wolverine live until he kills her. And she gives the same sort of creepy smile that Xavier did when he died. Seriously, telepaths are screwed, y’all.

And in the middle of all this devastation, not only is Wolverine perfectly clean (I guess the dirt just burned right off), but his hair is still perfectly styled. I guess that regenerates, too.

Back at the X-Mansion after it’s all over, Kitty stares at the graves of Jean, Scott, and Xavier, hoping the writers don’t fuck her character up before killing her off. Bobby finds Rogue in his room; she has taken the cure and lost her powers. She holds his hand and looks at him like a girl desperate to lose her virginity. And Wolverine watches Beast accept his promotion to U.N. Ambassador on TV. Hugh Jackman says, “Way to go, furball,” and walks off to fetch his final paycheck and we’re done.

Oh hell no. Because even though this is “The Last Stand, we have to set up the sequel, just in case. So we see a powerless Magneto point at a piece of metal and make it tremble ever so slightly, and then after the credits, we see Xavier’s friend, Dr. Moira MacTaggart, tending to a patient in a coma, when he wakes up and says, in Xavier’s voice, “Hello, Moira.”

Yeah, she’s as scared of another sequel as we are, I think. Fortunately (or not), Fox decided to go in the other direction and do prequels, because that worked so well for Star Wars.

Next week, if I can snag the DVD–X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Continuing our look back at X-Men: The Last Stand, the third in the series of X-Men films. The film actually didn’t start off too badly. There was decent action, a lot of familiar faces (both from the comics and from previous films), an interesting ethical dilemma in one plot and the continuation of an untied plot thread from X2 in the other main plotline. But fasten your seat belts, because stuff’s about to start going very wrong.

When we left off, Cyclops was receiving a kiss from a resurrected Jean Grey that not only curled his toes, but bubbled his face, which is probably bad. Professor X suddenly sends out a telepathic gasp that causes Wolverine and Storm to rush to his side. The professor tells them to go to Alkali Lake. When they get there, the entire valley is covered in fog. Storm raises a wind and clears the fog away.

There’s a longstanding cliche in anime that when a powerful character begins to build his energy for a big attack, it seems to turn off gravity just around him. Rocks and pebbles begin to lift up around his feet, followed sometimes by larger chunks of ground.

Now imagine that, but in live-action and with the whole lakeshore.  The air is full of drifting rocks and drops of water. Oh, and sunglasses.

They find Jean and rush her back to the mansion, but they don’t seem to waste any time looking for Scott, even though they know he was there.

Later, at the X-mansion, Xavier explains to Wolverine that Jean is the most powerful mutant in the world, a “Class 5” (a designation we were first introduced to a few scenes ago, when the unnamed mutant gang girl mentioned that Magneto was a Class 4). Her power was so strong that she developed dual personalities: the good, but weak Jean, and the wildly powerful Phoenix, a sociopathic monster driven by lustful appetites.  Xavier managed to lock the beast away in Jean’s mind, but it has been released by the trauma of her near-death under the lake. Wolverine is shocked that Xavier decided to mess with her mind against her will.

I don’t mind that they came up with a new origin for Phoenix, given how many times the comics have retconned the character. But seriously, a split personality? Isn’t that a little tired? What’s worse, the ethical conundrum brought up by the revelation of Professor X’s mental manipulation makes it hard to know whom to root for. The Professor has suddenly become an arrogant know-it-all, and Wolverine is irritatingly bitchy.

Meanwhile, on Alcatraz, the first recipient of the mutant cure being offered by Worthington Labs is stepping into the room. And what do you know, it’s Warren Worthington III (known to comics fans as the high-flying Angel, one of the original team), the grown-up version of the kid we saw trying to file off his budding wings last week. He comes in wearing an overcoat under which he has his wings strapped down with a leather harness to keep them hidden (a nod to the comics, in which he used the same trick). But though his dad tries to keep him calm, Warren freaks out at the needle and his wings burst loose.

And although this movie does a lot of things wrong, they actually manage to make Angel pretty impressive here. He flies off to freedom.

Magneto, meanwhile, has managed to track down the mobile prison and crushed the convoy. There is a really neat shot where we see Magneto levitate a car then clench his fist, which crushes the car instantly. Inside the trailer, Mystique makes good on a promise she made one of the guards earlier in the film by killing him; she sticks her feet out through the bars of her cell and snaps his neck.

Magneto, Pyro, and the gang kids enter the prison trailer to find that Mystique has already freed herself. She tells Magneto that she has learned the vaccine is derived from a young mutant; if the humans lose him, they lose the vaccine. Oh yeah, and there are two other prisoners in the trailer. We didn’t notice them before, because unlike Mystique, they had solid doors on their cells instead of bars.

And why did Mystique’s cell have bars instead of a door? Because the plot required that she kill a guard, and for apparently no other reason. This is sloppy filmmaking. It gets sloppier as they release the two other prisoners and we get half-hearted introductions to Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man and Cain Marko, the Juggernaut (who is imprisoned in his helmet, for some reason).

Seriously, given how much money they spent on this thing, the writing seems awfully half-assed. Sample dialogue:

Magneto: I could use a man of your talents.

Madrox: (shrug) I’m in.

But then one of the guards pulls a pistol filled with vaccine darts. Mystique throws herself in front of Magneto and takes the hit, losing her powers in the process. And even though we saw Rebecca Romijn as a blonde last film, she turns up here as a brunette.

Magneto coldly leaves her there, telling her she’s no longer one of them. For a guy who ostensibly hates everything the Nazis stood for, he seems awfully strict about racial purity. He doesn’t even thank her for saving him.

Oh, and speaking of half-assed writing, Beast is busy arguing with the President about his resignation over the whole vaccine gun thing. It’s a brief scene, that once again touches on a really potent political and ethical dilemma over government action and civil liberties, but the performances and dialogue seem to boil down to, “I hear what you’re saying, and I’m going to collect my paycheck and go wait for my next scene.”

Back at the X-Mansion, Jean finally wakes up from her coma to find Logan at her bedside. So she makes out with him, until he brings up the Professor and the missing Scott, at which point she goes apeshit and destroys the lab, flings Logan against the wall and stalks out. Professor X, of course, blames the mess on Wolverine.

Unnamed gang girl tells Magneto that she has detected a Class 5 mutant. Magneto knows exactly who she’s talking about, and what is up with his headquarters? I think it’s supposed to be lined with scrap metal or something (maybe to block Xavier’s telepathy?), but from some angles, it just looks like painted butcher paper.

Xavier, Storm and Wolverine arrive at the old Grey residence in Uncanny Valley, only to find that Magneto, Juggernaut, and the three unnamed gang kids are there also. Magneto and Charles go in to talk to Jean. Objects in the house are bouncing around like poltergeisty props in Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Charles tries to talk Jean into coming back to the X-Mansion to let him mess with her mind some more, while Magneto stands in the background snapping his fingers and saying, “Wha’evah! Wha’evah! You do what you want!”

Pretty soon, Jean snaps and starts destroying the house. Wolverine and Storm try to rush in to help, but Juggernaut and the kids fight them. And although some of the moments of action are good, there is one magnificently stupid moment that is unfortunately all too common in superhero movies and TV shows.

Juggernaut grabs Wolverine and flings him up through the ceiling. All well and good. Juggernaut is strong enough to do that. But a second later, Wolverine crashes back down through the ceiling in the next room.

Which looks cool, but is really stupid. Although Juggernaut might have thrown him up with enough force to break through, no way Wolverine then fell fast enough to break through from the upper floor like that. And you see stuff like this in movies all the time: someone kicks a soccer ball or throws a baseball or swings an axe against the superperson, only to have the item explode or shatter against their skin, even if the person doing the throwing or whatever only has normal human strength.

Okay, rant over, because Phoenix has decided she’s had enough of Xavier’s meddling. She levitates him from his wheelchair and holds him pinned in mid-air. And although we’ve seen hints of this before, this is the first time we see Phoenix in all her glory, and seriously, I’m not sure what they’re going for here. Instead of the fiery winged nimbus of the comics or the flaming eyes of the previous movie, they’ve gone for this grotesque swollen vein make-up.

And then there’s this bullet-time moment, where everything slows down, but Xavier delivers a line in his normal voice (I guess it’s supposed to be instantaneous thought speak or something) and then he smiles grotesquely at Wolverine before he explodes.

And now I’m starting to get mad at this movie, because seriously? Cyclops bubbles and dies off-screen, and now Xavier just suddenly explodes, and we’re supposed to care, because it’s wonderful Jean and the beloved, noble Professor  from the previous movies, except they’re not. Jean is this weirdly angry retconned creature, and the Professor is an arrogant know-it-all who does whatever he thinks best with other people’s lives, like a bald Bloomberg. I’m not just mad that they killed him off, but I’m mad that they ruined him so thoroughly that I don’t really care that he’s dead.

The only thing that could make this worse is a half-assed job of writing us out of the scene, and right on cue, Magneto steps up and says “My dear, come with me,” and whoosh, they’re gone.

Now it’s time for the funeral, where I can’t concentrate on Storm’s eulogy because I’m still mad, plus I’ve figured out that Storm’s hair reminds me of skunk-girl Chiana from Farscape.

Both during and after the funeral, Bobby comforts Kitty, and he even sneaks her out to the big fountain pool, which he freezes over so they can ice-skate hand-in-hand, which makes Rogue none too happy. But she doesn’t confront Bobby about it, because at least he can hold hands with Kitty without being killed.

So Rogue decides to go and take the cure. Wolverine catches her before she leaves, and she gives him a little speech about being able to hug and shake hands and kiss…

Out in the woods somewhere, Magneto and his Brotherhood have set up a tent city. Magneto tries to cement Jean on his side, only to have Phoenix nearly spear him with darts from the vaccine gun.

Meanwhile, Wolverine, Storm and Beast discuss shutting down the school when Angel shows up, looking for a safe haven. So, Storm just decides to keep the school open as casually as Halle Berry collecting a paycheck.

Wolverine gets a psychic message from Jean and runs off to find her, while Bobby goes to San Francisco (I think) to find Rogue. He runs into Pyro, who challenges him to a fire-and-ice fight before blowing up the clinic.

The President decides it’s time to take the war to the mutants. He orders his National Security Advisor, Bolivar Trask (in the comics, the guy who invented the Sentinels; in the movie, he’s played by a sleepwalking Bill Duke) to issue “Cure weapons” to the troops, and just in case you didn’t get that, the next scene shows soldiers divesting themselves of metal and grabbing plastic weapons as R. Lee Ermey voiceovers that all soldiers should divest themselves of metal and grab plastic weapons. My God, it’s like a cartoon.

Out in the forest, Wolverine runs into some members of Magneto’s Brotherhood and slices them up, just so we can remember what it is Wolverine does, and then he grabs a disguise and sneaks into the camp proper, where Magneto is giving a speech about taking over the vaccine factory on Alcatraz that doesn’t end in “Can you dig iiiiiiit?” but totally should.

Jean recognizes Logan in the crowd and they meet in the forest later. But before they can have a ridiculous by-the-numbers conversation, Magneto appears and flings Wolverine a mile away through the forest.

Back in Washington, D.C.,  everyone has gathered in the Situation Room to watch the special forces attack  Magneto’s tent city. Everything goes like clockwork until the images from the infrared satellite signal show the mutants disappearing until only one is left. This guy, James Madrox, who gets maybe twenty seconds total screen time, but whose name the movie decided we had to know, even though more significant characters are never introduced.

But hey, what are you gonna do?

Next week: The Last Stand‘s last stand.