X-MEN: FIRST CLASS: Killing Will Not Bring You Peace

X-Men: First Class (2011) – Directed by Matthew Vaughn – Starring Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, Caleb Landry Jones, Lucas Till, Edi Gathegi, Jason Flemyng, Alex Gonzalez, Oliver Platt, Ray Wise, Michael Ironside, James Remar, Glenn Morshower, Matt Craven, Annabelle Wallis Rebecca Romijn, and Hugh Jackman.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is a staggeringly great movie, and an incredibly important one, as it offers some variety from the standard superhero movie.

It seems almost inconceivable to me that we have now been blessed with so many superhero movies that a bit of malaise is starting to infect the genre. When Green Lantern tanked (tanked being a relative term in Hollywood), the we-all-knew-it-was-coming speculation posts started coming about the “end of the genre” and that people were suffering from superhero burnout.

Right.

Released within weeks of each other, FIRST CLASS took in $353 million at the international box office, while Green Lantern brought in $222 million. A month later Captain America: The First Avenger hit theaters and scored a $368 million haul. The Avengers? $1.5 billion. The Dark Knight Rises? $1 billion. The Amazing Spider-Man? $750 million.

Importantly, most of these films offer something different: there’s a World War II story, the ultimate fanboy movie, an incredibly serious story, and a teen angst story. Even Green Lantern offered something different in a cosmic story (though, really, the film over-marketed the cosmic and then delivered a largely earthbound snoozefest), and so the idea that people were “burned out” on superheroes as the DC/Warner Brothers folks tried to tell us rang false, and gave more evidence to the notion that the House of Warner does not understand how to make a superhero movie as well as their Mouse-owned counterparts. Success with DC characters seems much more random, while over at Marvel, there’s a point man in Kevin Fiege and a consolidated approach on how to make movies that feel like they occur in the same universe without all looking and sounding the same.

FIRST CLASS, of course, is produced over at Fox (and Spidey’s film rights are held by Sony), and Marvel’s Cinematic Universe was able to build on what Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi and David Goyer’s BLADE movies had done, and take superheroes to a new place. But really, I think the lesson that we can learn from Green Lantern and subsequent superhero movies is that simply making a movie about a superhero isn’t a guaranteed success. People still want good movies, and will still respond to good movies (more often than not), if they are marketed properly.

Which brings me back to X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

When I decided back at the beginning of the summer that I was going to review all superhero movies in order to collect them and release them as book, I wanted to save FIRST CLASS for last because it was the biggest superhero film that I hadn’t seen. I thought it would make a nice bow on the reviewing cake, and even though at some point this summer I realized I would need to break the superhero review book into three volumes (1 for Marvel, 1 for DC, and 1 for everything else) and concentrated on the Marvel films, FIRST CLASS is still the biggest release I had not watched, and thus serves as a fitting end to my run through all of Marvel’s cinematic releases.

FIRST CLASS is a fantastic movie, and does the smart thing to offer us something new. The original X-MEN trilogy had sputtered to a clumsy, tired ending with THE LAST STAND, but FIRST CLASS is not just a breath of fresh air, but an entire new weather front moving in. FIRST CLASS manages to both reaffirm the superhero genre as it gives us something that doesn’t look like anything else.

Set in the 1960s, FIRST CLASS is still told in the same universe as the X-MEN trilogy, and it does a marvelous job of being its own film while still throwing some easter eggs in there to connect this film with the Singer films. If you’ve been reading the Anxiety all summer, you know that I loved Avengers, and really liked both Dark Knight Rises and Amazing Spider-Man. My reaction to FIRST CLASS is much more similar to my reaction to Avengers, in that as soon as I was done watching it, I wanted to watch it immediately again. Which, since I was watching the Blu-ray, I could.

More than any other superhero film, FIRST CLASS thrives on style. There’s a good story here, but there are holes and missed beats throughout the film, yet this subtly styled 1960s vibe is just incredibly engaging to immerse oneself in.

It helps that FIRST CLASS is an incredibly confident movie. Helmed by Matthew Vaughn, FIRST CLASS is entirely comfortable with what it is and what it wants to do, so there’s no apologizing for being a superhero movie set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I have not ever watched Mad Men, but I get the sense that my reaction to FIRST CLASS is similar to many people’s reaction to that show (and not just because of the January Jones connection) in that it’s just a lot of fun t watch an American costume drama.

Because that’s what FIRST CLASS is – a costume drama with superheroes, oozing with equal parts 1960s cool and sexism. Vaughn has literally stuffed his film with stars, bringing in actors like Ray Wise, James Remar, Michael Ironside, Rebecca Romijn, and Hugh Jackman just for a scene or two, and these brief appearances of actors you know helps to make FIRST CLASS feel warm and comfortable. Watching the movie is akin to drinking an Old Fashioned or a High Ball, some old school drink that makes you feel warm and pleasant.

Ostensibly, FIRST CLASS is a film about the early relationship between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), and birth of the X-Men, but it’s really the overall tone and style that I find the most appealing. Each scene sparkles on multiple levels; seeing Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) and Emma Frost (January Jones) interact works because of the actors, the characters, and the style. Members of the Hellfire Club, Shaw and Frost appear a powerful duo, but then every so often Shaw will do something like order Frost to get him ice for his drink to reinforce who’s really in charge of the Club, which reinforces that we’re in the early ’60s, where this kind of accepted sexism isn’t unusual. When a perturbed Frost nonetheless goes and gets Shaw his ice without complaint, it carries a strong cultural resonance into the film, sending a ripple outwards to remind you of where and when this film is taking place.

Kevin Bacon is surprisingly great as Sebastian Shaw. I like Bacon as an actor, but I never would have thought he could give a performance as Sebastian Shaw that would stand alongside Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus, or Heath Ledger’s Joker. Yet that’s what Bacon achieves here; it’s not a role that calls for the fireworks of Ledger’s performance, but Bacon completely embodies Shaw, a rather laid-back, supremely confident villain who approaches the world with the assured calm of one who takes it as fact that he is better than everyone else, and still completely enjoys the chaos he creates. None of the performances here are overblown, but Bacon’s performance provides the experienced calm that balances with Xavier and Lensherr’s youthful exuberance.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are both very good, too, though I do feel their relationship was underdeveloped. FIRST CLASS doesn’t really put their varying philosophies to the test; by this, I mean that we do not see them develop as much as we see them playing chess with their already established positions. Right from the start, Charles wants to work with the humans while Erik wants to separate himself from them. There is a bit of development on Erik’s end, as he has to work out his revenge against the Nazi scientist who killed his mother and experimented on him (the scientist was Sebastian Shaw, under a different name) and then find himself in Charles’ world, but there’s never any real tension as to where Erik is going to end up, and not just because we know these two men will end up in opposition to one another.

McAvoy plays Charles as good guy, but also as a smooth, swinging bachelor. He uses the same line repeatedly to pick up women, and is a bit narcissistic when it comes to his hair, but when CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) arrives to bring him in on her investigation into Shaw and the Hellfire Club, Charles immediately signs up.

He brings Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) along with him. In this X-Men cinematic universe, Charles discovers Raven when they are children. Raven transformed herself into an image of Charles’ mother in order to raid the kitchen for food. Instead of being mad or angry, Charles is enthused about finding another mutant and invites Raven to stay with them.

That Raven grows up as Charles’ friend and chooses Erik’s side is supposed to be the main emotional arc of the film, but it really doesn’t work for me. Raven simply isn’t given enough screen time for this change to have any kind of power to it. For this to have worked, I think Raven needed to be seen as an equal to Charles and Erik (in terms of her place in the narrative) and this just isn’t the case. Raven is often in the near background of a scene and we’re supposed to draw a lot of what she’s going through based on secondary action. I think FIRST CLASS would have been better if Raven was clearly positioned as the third point on a triangle between Charles and Erik, and that we saw their actions through her eyes, because without this, Raven doesn’t wholly work as a character for me. This isn’t Lawrence’s fault, as she’s quite good, but rather a fault of the way the film has been assembled.

Working as a secret organization inside the CIA, Charles and Erik assemble a team of mutants to train under them. The most enjoyable sequence of the film is the recruitment process, as we see them in quick flashes making their pitch to a number of mutants, culminating in their visit to recruit Logan (Hugh Jackman). Erik and Charles approach the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking mutant at a bar, and have the following exchange:

“I’m Erik Lensherr.”

“Charles Xavier.”

“Go f*ck yourself.”

And out the bar our two stars go. It’s a great scene, and combined with Rebecca Romijn’s brief appearance later on in the movie, a nice link to the Singer movies. (And yes, this revelation that Raven grew up in Charles’ house begs the question as to why there wasn’t more emotional resonance between them in the Singer trilogy, especially when Raven is de-powered in LAST STAND, but that will eventually be just another strike against Brett Ratner’s disappointing conclusion to what Singer had started.) By the time of FIRST CLASS’ production, Marvel was already dropping its characters from one film into other films to create a sense of a shared universe, and it was a nice surprise to see Jackman and Romijn show up here to provide an X-equivalent.

Charles and Erik end up with a team that includes Raven, Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Angel (Zoe Kravitz), Havok (Lucas Till), Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), and Darwin (Edi Gathegi). There’s little reason to complain about getting a “first team” that doesn’t include the classic organization of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, and Angel because of how the X-Men universe has been assembled on screen. You are welcome to complain about it, of course, but I’m happier to have this movie tie into the other films than to be a simple reproduction of the comics that would have negated the earlier X-films. What is worth complaining about is that in the cinematic version of a comic book franchise that has long been a bastion of diversity and coded in such a way that kids of all races, religions, gender, sexual orientation, etc. could identify with the X-Men, yet it’s the two non-whites who get jettisoned, as Angel joins up with Shaw’s forces and Darwin is killed trying to stop Shaw.

That’s a small (but serious) complaint in an otherwise excellent movie. I’m probably going to re-watch FIRST CLASS as much as any superhero movie short of Avengers, as it’s a movie that just works from start to finish. The pacing is fact, the acting is good, the story (which ties in the Cuban Missile Crisis) is solid, and the style is simply superb. It’s not as good as Avengers, and it doesn’t contain characters I like as much as the Avengers-related or Spider-Man films, but X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is exciting, engaging, and utterly fantastic film making.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE: I’m Gonna Cut Your Goddamned Head Off. See If That Works.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) – Directed by Gavin Hood – Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins, Dominic Monaghan, Ryan Reynolds, Taylor Kitsch, Will.i.am, Kevin Durand, and Patrick Stewart.

This is the fourth movie in which Hugh Jackman has played Wolverine in a leading role in a motion picture. Who else has done that with a superhero? Christopher Reeve did it, and Robert Downey, Jr. is currently doing it, filming Iron Man 3 as of the writing of this review which will give him four when you include Avengers, and …

Exactly. Respect to Jackman.

It strikes me that X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE is something of a forgotten superhero film. It never seems to come up in many discussions of the genre, seemingly having fallen into that slightly indifferent middle ground – nobody seems to hate it, but nobody seems to love it, either.

By “nobody” I mean fans of the genre because most professional critics took a blowtorch to WOLVERINE. Coming out just three years ago in 2009, WOLVERINE already feels like it’s been out for ages, which is what happens with films that fall through the cracks. In part, I think this is because WOLVERINE was one of the first superhero movies to come out post-Iron Man, and films that come out in the immediate wake of game changers usually suffer because they weren’t made with the knowledge of how the game was being altered. There’s a real sense of uneasiness among professional critics about how to react to superhero films, a reticence to think of these films as anything but sill action movies for grown up boys.

It’s ridiculous, of course, and every time some of them start writing about a new superhero movie they reveal their ignorance of the genre and their failings as critics. A. O. Scott of The New York Times has seemingly been citing the “end” of the cinematic superhero for as long as there’s been a superhero films being made, and he uses WOLVERINE to decry the entire genre:

“X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue. A twist at the end that gives poor Wolverine a bad case of amnesia — turning him into a kind of Jason Bourne with sideburns — is a virtual admission that nothing terribly interesting has been learned about the character. He forgets his origins before the movie devoted to their exposition is even over. It won’t take you much longer.”

Try and follow Scott’s “logic”: Because Wolverine gets amnesia that’s an admission that nothing interesting has been learned about the character.

Oooooookay.

If a story ends with a character getting amnesia, that’s an indication we haven’t learned anything interesting about them? How does that remotely make sense? Maybe he missed the idea that this was a prequel? Scott reveals his own critical shortcomings when he writes, “What’s worse, the outsize emotions that give any decent superhero epic its adolescent, pop-operatic gravity are diminished by the sheer hectic confusion of the storytelling.” First, Scott clearly indicates that he doesn’t see superheroes as anything more than adolescent fantasies, which means we’re dealing with a critic whose conception of superheroes is stuck somewhere between 1939 and Amazing Spider-Man 96 (the beginning of the Harrry Osborn tripping on LSD storyline). Such ignorance-slash-elitism isn’t rare, of course, and Scott is hardly alone on this, as comic book fans well know. It’s the second part of his phrase that irks me, the part where he cites the “sheer hectic confusion of the storytelling.”

WOLVERINE is not a complicated movie. At all. There’s plenty of characters dropping in and dropping out but the story isn’t confused about what it’s doing. At all.

At. All.

Look, I’m not saying A. O. Scott or anyone has to like superhero movies. I’m not a huge fan of torture porn stuff like Hostel and Human Centipede and unlike professional critics, if I don’t want to watch a movie, I don’t have to. My point is that if you don’t like a particular genre – admit it. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the great Roger Ebert shows how to do it. In his 2-star review of WOLVERINE, he bluntly states:

“Am I being disrespectful to this material? You bet. It is Hugh Jackman’s misfortune that when they were handing out superheroes, he got Wolverine, who is for my money low on the charisma list. He never says anything witty, insightful or very intelligent; his utterances are limited to the vocalization of primitive forces: anger, hurt, vengeance, love, hate, determination. There isn’t a speck of ambiguity. That Wolverine has been voted the No. 1 comic hero of all time must be the result of a stuffed ballot box. At least, you hope, he has an interesting vulnerability? I’m sure X-Men scholars can tell you what it is, although since he has the gift of instant healing, it’s hard to pinpoint. When a man can leap from an exploding truck, cling to an attacking helicopter, slice the rotor blades, ride it to the ground, leap free and walk away (in that ancient cliche where there’s a fiery explosion behind him but he doesn’t seem to notice it), here’s what I think: Why should I care about this guy? He feels no pain and nothing can kill him, so therefore he’s essentially a story device for action sequences.”

What I love about Ebert’s review, and what I love about the man’s approach to criticism, is that his position is all laid out for you. When I started my series of Star Trek reviews, I was open about the fact that I’d never been much of a fan, and that if you want to dismiss my thoughts on Star Trek on the grounds that “I don’t get it,” well, yeah, you’re right.

Ebert has voiced some of the frustrations the anti-Wolvie comic crowd feels about the character, though truthfully most of that seems to centered on the fact that, “He’s everywhere!” But what’s important is that he voices his frustrations with the character.

Wolverine is one of the few characters who could win Favorite and Least Favorite Character in the same year. Logan became the poster child for the X-expansion of the ’80s and ’90s (bringing with it much adulation and hatred), and under the care of Bryan Singer and Hugh Jackman, the cinematic Wolverine became a friendlier, more heroic, and less-troubled guy, which made him more palatable to folks who didn’t like the angry killer of the comics, but also, to me, less interesting.

And this brings us to X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, which is a seriously good film.

WOLVERINE doesn’t reach the heights of the best films in the superhero genre, but it’s the equivalent of walking into a comic shop, buying a TPB off the shelf, reading it, and feeling like you got your money’s worth because it delivers exactly what it promises in a really good way. There are no aspirations here to be literary, but there are aspirations to leave it all on the screen. WOLVERINE strikes me as a film made specifically for comic book fans. We’ve got a conflicted Logan who unleashes the animal and tons of cameos. Are there too many characters floating around? Yeah, probably, but we’ve got Logan in nearly every scene taking us from start to finish, and so the movie, much more than most superhero movies, gives you the sense of an entire shared universe taking place out there beyond the confines of the screen.

I dig that, and I dig Hugh Jackman’s performance here, which runs across a broad emotional spectrum. Importantly, this is the first time I believed that he was a dangerous killer and that this was someone you definitely did not want to mess with.

There’s five acts to WOLVERINE

Act I: CHILDHOOD

A quick sequence that shows James Howlett (the pre-Wolverine, pre-Logan Logan) sick in bed and his buddy, Victor, watching over him. James’ dad ends up in an argument with Thomas Logan, and Thomas kills him, which causes James’ mutant ability to pop, which results in him jamming his claws into Thomas’ torso. Thomas dies but not before telling James that he’s really his dad. Whoops. This results in James and Victor taking off and having their relationship evolve from that of friends to brothers. “And brothers look out for each other,” Victor says repeatedly throughout the film. This sequence isn’t bad, but it’s helped that it’s short. One of the problems with Ghost Rider was all the time spent with Johnny Blaze before he grows up to become Nic Cage. As much as I just want a movie to be good, I also want to see the star whose name is above the title.

ACT II: GROWING PAINS & SEPARATION

WOLVERINE uses its opening credit sequence very effectively. Needing to get from 1845 to the film’s present (initially, Vietnam, and then later the late 70s) quickly, the opening titles show Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Victor (Liev Schrieber) fighting together in all sorts of famous battles of the Civil, World, and Korean variety. For some reason, critics seemed to be tripped up by the fact that two Canadians were fighting in the American Civil War, which is silly because lots of non-Americans fought in the Civil War. As these scenes unfold, we see that Logan is slowly becoming concerned with Victor’s blood lust, which gets us to Vietnam where Victor kills a senior officer. After the two brothers’ mutant powers allows them to survive a firing squad, they are visited in jail by William Stryker (Danny Huston), who wants to recruit them into a situation that will allow them to be who they are.

It’s a not-so-subtle Magneto-styled seduction, and Logan and Victor are taken in to Stryker’s mutant strike team alongside Agent Zero (Daniel Henney), Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), John Wraith (Will.i.am), a pre-blobby Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand), and Chris Bradley (Dominic Monaghan). They go around the world and do bad things at Stryker’s behest, and honestly, I could have watched 90 minutes of this team doing their thing. It’s really impressive how quickly the director Gavin Hood establishes who each character is, why they’re part of the team, and how they relate to one another.

And I know I’m not the only one who’s said this, but I am one of the ones that’s been saying this since I first spun WOLVERINE in the DVD player: give me a Ryan Reynolds-starring Deadpool movie right now. Man, why does Hollywood insist on making a nice guy out of him? He’s at his best when he’s kinda dickish. He’s fantastic here, absolutely fantastic. If we have to endure Reynolds in that mediocre Green Lantern movie, can’t we get a Deadpool film to balance the scales?

(Just look at how awesome the upcoming Deadpool video game looks. Suck it, Wolverine!)

This is a Wolverine-centric movie, though, so we only get to hang with this squad for a bit before Wolverine quits on them.

ACT III: DOMESTIC BLISS

Logan moves to Canada, where he’s killing trees and shacking up with schoolteacher Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). It becomes 1979 and the film signals this a bit with older cars, but for the most part, it’s completely contemporary in look and feel. They’re happy together until Stryker shows up with Agent Zero and lets Logan know that someone is killing all the members of their squad. Logan growls and snarls and tells him to bugger off but that wouldn’t make for much of a movie, so Victor shows up to kill Kayla, driving Logan into the adamantium-having arms of Stryker.

It’s a shame that they didn’t bring Brian Cox back to reprise the role he played so incredibly well in X2, but Danny Huston is a very good actor and he turns in a very good role here, so while I’d have loved to have Cox, I can’t complain about having Huston.

Logan agrees to the process and so gets himself pumped full of indestructible metal, but then he hears Stryker giving away his not-so-nice plans and jumps out of the water, kills a bunch of people, and jumps off a cliff face into a waterfall.

It’s to the movie’s credit that for all the origin stories we’ve seen, Hood delivers a very effective and un-rushed origin sequence. It’s nice to watch and Jackman, Schrieber, Huston, Reynolds, and Collins all make these scenes work really well. In fact, I enjoy the movie more before he gets his adamantium then afterwards. If I was making the movie, I think I would have structured it so Logan going in that tank was the final scene. Victor would have driven him to Stryker and Logan would have agreed to become Weapon X, and then he would have sat up in that tank with no memory of what came before.

ACT IV: THE HUNT FOR VICTOR

After bailing on Stryker, Logan ends up being adopted for a day by the Canadian version of Jon and Martha Kent. They’re nice people, so they have to die. The chemistry between Logan and Agent Zero (who does the killing) is good stuff and the action sequence with Logan against the Zero-led strike team is solid stuff. When he launches at the helicopter … I mean, if you don’t like that scene, you’re not going to like the movie.

He leaves a heavy body count and goes on the hunt for Victor, which involves actual detective work. Yep, there’s no Xavier, no Cerebro, just Logan hunting down a lead. It’s good stuff, and his verbal and physical showdown with the non-Blobby Fred Dukes is a blast.

All of these brief interactions with characters who have really small roles shows just how good of an actor Hugh Jackman is – even though he’s the star and Wolverine is always the center of the movie, Jackman is a very gracious actor, giving each scene what it needs. If he needs to be the lead, he’s the lead, and if the scene needs for Dukes to get the better of him, Jackman allows Kevin Durand to shine brighter.

Logan runs into Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) and then Victor, again, and then we’re off to Three Mile Island.

ACT V: THE SWERVE

Kayla Silverfox is still alive and Logan’s reaction is well-played. He’s spent all this time acting out of revenge and now when he discovers that there was no need for this, that Stryker and Victor and Kayla were all manipulating him, he doesn’t go beserk, he just walks off.

And, yeah, that wouldn’t work by itself so when Kayla gets hurt Logan comes back (she really does love him even if she was ordered to love him) and there’s a huge fight in which he frees all the mutants (including a non-James Marsden Cyclops), and then fights a Frankenstein Deadpool (all of the mutant powers Stryker has been stealing have been put into Wilson’s body), which is the dumbest thing in the film.

Why would you shut Wilson up? There’s a great line from Logan about it, but why play against the strength of your actors? That doesn’t make sense to me. Victor comes back to save Logan from Deadpool so he can kill him himself and … punch slash kick slash teleport punch optic blasts punch run teleport slash Deadpool dies. (Until the post-credits scene, at least.)

Logan’s memory gets damaged when Styker drops two adamantium bullets in his skull and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) shows up to usher the kids to freedom. Er, I mean, school.

It’s all quick and hard-hitting and good superhero violence. WOLVERINE isn’t a game changer, but it’s a darn good time, and when Victor asks Logan if he even knows how to kill him, and Logan growls back, “I’m gonna cut your goddamned head off. See if that works,” a huge smile broke out across my face.

For a movie like WOLVERINE, what more could you want?

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.