We went out on a sort of triple-date with two other couples to see X-Men 3. Not a date movie you say? Perhaps. But consider that the three guys each have a strong geek streak running through them (though some may hide it a little better) and our respective significant others all have a high threshold for… well, us.

In any case I guess there was enough consensus that there was very little grumbling (if any, I really don’t remember any dissent) and so X-Men it was.

Now I liked the first X-Men. The second was okay but unlike many folks I thought there was something lacking with it. It seemed like they were still stumbling with the same problem they had before which is that there are way too many X-Men characters to make for anything even remotely resembling character development in a two hour action film. So they try to cram as many in as possible but they usually just end up with a slew of cameos as the big name stars (McKellan, Stewart, Berry, Jackman and Paquin) steal all the screen time.

It was forgivable in the first movie (“An X-Men movie came out!”) and reluctantly tolerable in the second (“Well, they got in some cool new guys like Nightcrawler”) but at this point it’s getting stale. And bizarrely, they still struggled with too many characters but they managed to kill or disable a ton of them and generally took massive liberties with characters, alignments and introductions such that it was difficult while reading the credits to determine when, exactly, some of the characters had actually appeared. For example, I defy you to identify Psylocke or Jubilee first time through the movie. That I only know they were in it because we watched the credits (there is a credit cookie at the end) means, to me, someone didn’t do their job completely.

I swear this is the last time I mention it, but if you want to do X-Men right, you need to do what they did in the comic book and split them into multiple teams. I still maintain that if you made two movies with the same basic storyline but with each following a different group of mutants through the narrative arc with copious crossover (you could see the same scene with all X-Men from two different perspectives, for example, or the actions of the villains in one movie could make a setback encountered by the other team more clear in the second movie), you could ping the fanboys’ wallets twice and you would at least have the opportunity to give the characters the attention they deserve (and in a way, demand).

Anyway, the main problem with The Last Stand is that I’m tired of Magneto. Sure McKellan is a good actor, but the mutant-vs.-mutant theme has gotten a bit stale. Where’s the Sentinels? Apocalypse? Omega Red? But even if they felt compelled to bring Magneto back in, the film’s secondary plot revolving around a cure for the mutant X gene fails on so many levels. For one thing it’s boring: Who wants to watch a super hero movie where they lose their powers? For another it isn’t properly handled because in situations where it could be useful it is mostly ignored and the mutant who’s mutant ability is to undo mutant abilities is both paradoxal (wouldn’t he cancel his own mutant ability out?) is treated like some kind of artifact since they never even bother to try and explain how they were able to synthesize his ability. If that were possible, why not sythesize Storm’s ability, or Wolverine’s healing factor? Pharmecuetical companies could make a mint with a regeneration injection, so why would they bother curing mutants? Scott Kurtz on PvP has similar complaints and I concur with some of his gripes.

The whole thing is sorta cheap and cop-out-y. Even the credit cookie is bogus, as is the event that necessitated it. In tandem the two events cheapen the entire movie. The Dark Phoenix thing is handled better than I expected, which is the one bright spot (hurr) in the script. I would have preferred the entire movie revolve around the Phoenix storyline. At least from here on out we can fully expect any additional movies to be complete crap since Hugh Jackman will probably splinter off and do solo Wolverine movies and with most of the other big name stars either facing dead characters or expressing clear disinterest in further sequels, X-Men 4 would end up looking like a second rate New Mutants adaptation.