X-MEN: THE LAST STAND: I’m the Juggernaut, B*tch

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – Directed by Brett Ratner – Starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Shawn Ashmore, Ellen Page, Aaron Stanford, Vinnie Jones, Stan Lee, Daniel Cudmore, Eric Dane, Patrick Stewart, and R. Lee Ermey.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is a movie that’s half-okay and half-stupid, and the end result is a movie that I just wanted to end during the entire second half. There are times when THE LAST STAND is so laughably bad that you wonder how anyone could let it out the door, but for the most part, it’s nothing more than a disappointing movie. It’s not the worst movie ever made, but it’s just so incoherently put together that it gives off the vibe of people making it up as they went along.

Bryan Singer is out of the director’s chair and Brett Ratner is in, and it’s easy to lay the blame for LAST STAND at Ratner’s feet because he’s not half the director Singer is, but let’s be clear, Singer left LAST STAND so he could go work on Superman Returns, which is even worse than LAST STAND.

To give LAST STAND its due, the first half of the film isn’t really all that bad. It’s certainly faint praise to say, “Hey, it really is mediocre!” but this movie needs all the help it can get. LAST STAND opens with Scott Summers (James Marsden) still being all mopey and self-pitying about Jean Grey’s death. He’s shirking his duties as instructor, which means Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to fill in during a Danger Room sequence with Storm (Halle Berry), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page). After a “Days of Future Past” scenario, Cyclops takes off to find Jean back at Alkali Lake.

He finds her, they make out, and she kills him.

Yup, another X-MEN movie, another waste of James Marsden.

Logan and Storm get to Alkali Lake and bring her home, where she wakes up as the Phoenix.

Yeah, so, about that. Turns out Jean (Famke Janssen) has always had this really powerful dark aspect of her persona and Xavier put a whole mess of psychic blocks in her head to create a split personality. It’s sort of amazing how much dumb sh*t this insipid script makes these good actors say. Logan gets all uppity with Xavier (Patrick Stewart), but then Phoenix Jean wakes up so they can dry hump a bit before Logan realizes something is wrong. So she slams him against the wall with the power of her brain and exits the mansion.

She heads to her parent’s house, where Xavier and Magneto (Ian McKellan) try to convince her to come to their side. Xavier does his whole, “I can help you” bit while Mags is all, “I want you to be what you are” and Phoenix Jean can’t handle any of this so she levitates the house and then kills Xavier.

Yeah. She kills Xavier. That means in the first hour of the film, Jean Grey manages to kill the two most important men in her life, and the question I have is, Why?

There’s an incredibly strong sense of childishness in Ratner’s film, as if the film is doing everything it can to wipe out Singer’s work. Just look at what Ratner does to some of Singer’s primary players:

Cyclops: Killed.

Xavier: Killed.

Rogue: Checks out halfway through the film so she can go get the Cure, a shot that stops you from being a mutant.

Jean: Murders Husband. Murders mentor. Then turns into a mass murderer. And then gets killed.

Bobby: Goes from being the decent boyfriend to scamming on Kitty Pryde behind his girlfriend’s back.

Mystique: De-powered by the Cure, and left behind by Magneto.

Nightcrawler: Doesn’t Appear.

Stryker: Doesn’t Appear.

Magneto: De-powered by the Cure.

There’s also way too many new characters introduced in the third film: Angel (Ben Foster), Kitty, Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and a bunch of new Brotherhood members. This is the third film in this trilogy – I’m supposed to care about nearly everyone at this point, and I don’t. Up until Xavier’s funeral, though, this film isn’t awful, and Storm’s eulogy is actually pretty moving. I don’t know why they had Wolverine stand off to the side like he’s still not 100% a part of Xavier’s school because, as is rightly pointed out later in the film, Logan has been completely domesticated. The real problem is what comes after the eulogy, when the film resorts to a bunch of silly fights between people who’ve gotten a lot dumber between movies.

Hiring Ratner as a director could have worked if the film had been tailored to his strengths (childish buddy comedies, I guess) but clearly he’s not a guy who can handle intelligence or philosophy very well and so asking him to take over for Bryan Singer and not giving him the time to come up with a suitable script doomed LAST STAND right from the start.

THE LAST STAND ends up being not a very good movie. There’s some interesting philosophy here if you want to look for it (and Ratner doesn’t), but it’s an uneven, uninteresting film. There’s so many subplots haphazardly tossed against the wall that the film never develops a clear narrative. I’ll say this for LAST STAND, too – it’s not a fun movie to write about. When I was watching it, I just wanted it to be over.

And now that I’m writing about it, I just want this to be over with, too.

INCEPTION: Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down

INCEPTION (2010) – Directed by Christopher Nolan – Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine.

Sometimes when you wait forever to see a movie you become as aware of the cultural discussion surrounding the movie as about the movie itself. I’m not just talking about the general “this movie rocks/blows” discussion, either, but all of the critical reactions and controversies and whatnot and so you have to be careful about watching your preconceptions. I’m not saying you have to forget about them; I remember when TITANIC came out and all the pre-film talk was about how it was ridiculously over-budget and that it was never going to make the money back because it was such a complete disaster and then, yeah, turns out it was a highly enjoyable love story with loads of mass appeal. Like or love Titanic, the force of the film allowed you to watch it on its own terms; even if you went in thinking mostly about the budget, I think the film ultimately worked or didn’t for you because of the movie and not because of an external reasons.

All of that is prelude to INCEPTION, Chris Nolan’s big budget summer non-Batman-related blockbuster. Before the film was released to the general audience, there was a wave of “greatest movie evah!” reviews generated, which ultimately led to the predictable backlash wave that said the film really wasn’t the greatest movie in the history of cinema. (I think Slate even ran an article anticipating the backlash.) Reviews like those just mentioned seem to be about positioning both a film and a critic in the discourse as opposed to just, you know, watching a movie and talking about it.

I mention this because there’s so much cultural weight gathered behind INCEPTION that I feel I have to reference it to provide the context for this review.

Which basically says INCEPTION is a pretty enjoyable crime caper, but certainly not one I’m going to obsess over. (In other words, kids, this’ll be a short review.) I think it’s smart, but I don’t think it’s particularly mind blowing, and that’s neither a compliment nor a dig. Nolan uses the concept of dreams within dreams to serve as the transition from one action sequence to the next, but it’s not any more difficult to follow than it is to follow Tom Cruise fighting in a building as Ving Rhames waits in the van outside.

The most interesting twist is how DiCaprio’s crew isn’t taking something away but rather putting something inside Cillian Murphy’s mind in an attempt to convince him to break up his father’s massive energy company. It’s a bit overwrought because the movie makes too big of a deal about how “inception” has to have an idea boiled down to its most basic concept so the idea can grow naturally. Yeah, whatever. It’s not like if Leo shows up in Cillian’s dream and shows him his enviro-doc that Cillian is going to be like, “I really like your message, but I will not follow it because it’s not my idea.”

It does, however, let us have a whole range of cool sets so , yeah … win some, lose some.

The use of DiCaprio in the film runs the risk of torpedoing the movie at a few points because his character is so damaged and so emotionally stilted over his dead wife and the children he can’t go back to see that sometimes the film mistakes itself for a serious drama instead of good old fashioned entertainment. (This happens with DiCaprio, sometimes. See: The Departed.) At some point you start to wonder why Nolan would build a movie around a downer of a character, but as DiCaprio’s character unravels further and further as the film progresses, his descension is matched by Ellen Page’s ascension as a character, providing a real balance to the story. It’s Page’s character who questions and challenges and ultimately saves DiCaprio.

They need Page’s character to do this because the rest of the cast is sort of mindlessly filling out their roles because it’s a job. Joseph Gordon-Leavitt gets angry but falls in line. Tom Hardy (who sucked so hard in Star Trek: Nemesis that his competent job here is something of a revelation) marks a few snide comments but falls in line. Ken Watanabe is the money man who tags along, who just sort of stands there, looking bad-ass and falling in line.

Unlike a good crime caper, however, there’s no real unit cohesion here. People just seem to do things instead of being there specifically to do the special thing that they do better than anyone else. It all looks cool but it certainly doesn’t feel cool. The script could’ve used sharper dialogue; this is a crime caper, after all, so the genre allows for a fair bit of verbal style, but we don’t get anything distinct – unless one counts mindless dream philosophy distinct.

In terms of dreams and philosophy, INCEPTION doesn’t really offer anything more insightful than A Nightmare on Elm Street. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. It’s great if this movie blows your mind and all, but it probably means you’ve never read a 1970s comic book. Which, you know, good for you because now you’ve got thousands of back issues to go read.

Like any weak Bond movie, however, there’s unnecessarily long action sequences in INCEPTION. It’s always fun to watch dudes fight on skis and snowmobiles, but this sequence just seems to go on and on and on and on and on as faceless people punch, shoot, kick, stab, blow up, and kill each other, and then land in a puff of white snow. What I find, too, is that minus an attractive set, Nolan’s action sequences are incredibly mundane and repetitive.

I kept hearing, too, about how the ending is all “what does it mean?” but, again, it just didn’t seem that mind-blowing to me. DiCaprio’s character has a totem which is this little spinning metal thing. DiCaprio spins it and if it falls, that means he’s not dreaming. If it keeps spinning, it means he’s still dreaming. What? Anyway, at the end of the film when the good guys have “won” by planting Inception into Murphy’s mind, the thingy is spinning and he’s with his kids and the screen goes dark. OHMYGAWD WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Here’s what happened – the spinning thing fell over. How do I know? Because you could hear it wobbling, and things that wobble fall over. Unless it’s a Weeble, and his totem was definitely not a Weeble. So maybe Nolan gets a little credit for his final swerve not being the swerve you could see was coming for the preceding two hours.

I’m not slamming INCEPTION as some stupid movie. It’s a big, engaging movie with a great cast, gorgeous sets, and mostly enjoyable action sequences. I liked it. Seeing cities fold in on themselves or trains appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the city is visually appealing. The idea of interlopers into a dream and the act of world building keeps you interested, but it’s not anything new or daring or exceptionally rendered, either. On the whole, INCEPTION isn’t brilliant but it is smart, which makes it a very enjoyable crime/action movie, and that completely works for me.

But let’s not pretend INCEPTION is revolutionary film making. It’s like the best Mission: Impossible movie; if they wanted to make a Mission: Impossible movie completely devoid of any humor.