TED: This is the Theme Song from the Movie Octopussy

Ted (Theatrical Cut; 2012) – Directed by Seth McFarlane – Starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth McFarlane, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Jessica Barth, Bill Smitrovich, Ralph Garman, Alex Borstein, Laura Vandervoort, Ryan Reynolds, Sam Jones, Norah Jones, Tom Skerritt, Ted Danson, and Patrick Stewart.

Any movie that shows this much love for Flash Gordon and Octopussy and Fenway Park is going to score points in my book.

That’s not why I like TED, though, as Seth MacFarlane’s first foray into live-action movie making is the kind of movie that if I were 15 I’d watch a billion times. Heck, forget 15. When I was an undergrad at Syracuse, there were a handful of movies we watched over and over again: Dazed and Confused, Searching for Bobby Fischer, whatever Bond movie TBS was showing in their annual marathon. TED is that kind of movie, the kind that I just want to watch on permanent repeat, and it’s not because it’s funny (because it is), but because it’s a really well told story. Truth is, I’d watch it even if I didn’t laugh at it because I don’t really care if comedies are funny, so long as they’re good.

It may sound odd to hear me say that I don’t really care if comedies are funny, but I’m much more interested at this stage in my life in a comedy telling a good story than I am in how many laughs it generates. Certainly, I like to laugh and certainly, I want to laugh at a comedy, but simply stringing a bunch of funny jokes together isn’t really enough for me. If too many of the jokes fall flat, I lose interest and it’s not a movie I’m going to want to come back to over and over again.

That means I’m not going to buy the Blu-ray, Hollywood.

Great comedies like The Hangover, Young Frankenstein, Ghostbusters, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut are funny, but they all tell engaging stories, too, and it’s that narrative element that had me worried before seeing TED.

Look, I like Seth MacFarlane. I like The Family Guy and The Cleveland Show and, well, not so much American Dad, but they’re successful more because they do funny bits or create funny situations rather than because of any narrative strength. If one looks closely at these universes, they fall apart, and I largely agree with the infamous Eric Cartman takedown of The Family Guy on South Park where he railed against the show’s style of humor. Cartman discovers that Family Guy is actually written by manatees pushing balls around a fish tank, arguing that MacFarlane’s signature show is often built on weird associations. Unlike Cartman, I can acknowledge that style and still love it, but there’s a huge difference between a 22 minute cartoon and a 106 minute live-action movie.

And yes, I said 106 minutes as Netflix doesn’t send you the unrated version of the movie. If you get TED through them, all you get is the theatrical release, so that’s what I’ve watched. It’s a shameless attempt to get you to buy the Blu-ray.

In this case, it’s worked, though I’m buying that Blu-ray less because of the extra six minutes and more because I dug this movie so much.

How can you not love a film where Norah Jones jokes about f*cking a teddy bear in a closet?

Or maybe that’s just me.

I was so worried I wouldn’t like the film that it actually sat on my counter for over a week before I watched it. I like the idea of TED so much, of a kid’s wish granting life to his stuffed animal which then grows up alongside him, that I thought watching it could only ruin what the film was like in my head, but those fears were totally unfounded as the film was strong from start to finish, with excellent performances from Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis as John Bennett and Lori Collins, a couple about to celebrate their four-year anniversary as the film opens. Perhaps as a hedge against his own style to toss innumerable random jokes at the audience, MacFarlane (who also voices Ted) populates TED with a whole host of secondary characters who might get a single joke or two and that’s it. Just when you’ve figured out that the gorgeous blonde in that one scene is Laura Vandervoort (but before you can remember how to spell it), you realize you’ve seen her second and final scene.

TED opens in a winter early in John’s life, and we see he’s the unpopular kid in his neighborhood. His parents get him a huge teddy bear for Christmas, and John makes a wish that the bear was alive so they could be real friends. The wish is granted and John wakes up to find his teddy bear walks and talks and just wants to be his best friend. John’s parents freak out, as one would expect, but Ted wins them over and soon he’s a national celebrity, appearing on covers of magazines and making a guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

I love this part of the movie for two reasons. The first is that it’s great to see the film build in a backstory that explains why people aren’t always freaking out when a big teddy bear starts walking and talking. We don’t have to get all those silly reactions and watch as everyone adjusts. Everyone already has so we can just get on with the movie. The second reason I love it is that it gives us a chance to hear Patrick Stewart as the narrator being one of the funniest parts of the entire movie.

Stewart’s voice is so rich, so strong, so British, that when he recites something completely inappropriate, it’s extra funny just because of is manner of speaking. “Now if there’s one thing you can be sure of,” he tells us after John makes his wish to bring Ted to life, “it’s that nothing is more powerful than a young boy’s wish. Except an Apache helicopter. An Apache helicopter has machine guns and missiles. It is an unbelievably impressive complement of weaponry, an absolute death machine.” Stewart delivers these lines with such glee that it sets a perfect tone for the film. There’s bits that made me laugh out loud, but mostly TED is just constantly amusing, wonderfully blending real sentiment and absurdity.

At it’s core, of course, TED is a movie about a guy unwilling to embrace the idea of growing up. That he lives with his teddy bear is the primary image of this Peter Pan Syndrome, but he also has a “career” working at a car rental company, smokes pot (with Ted) whenever he can, and is still afraid of thunder. A moment that perfectly blends MacFarlane’s mix of sentimentality and absurdity comes when John and Lori are in bed and a massive thunderclap hits. John freaks out and Ted comes running into the bedroom, shouting, “Thunder buddies for life, right, John?”

“Thunder buddies for life!” Ted yells back as the best friends launch into their “thunder buddy” song.

That scene also perfectly encapsulates the cleverness of TED’s script. This isn’t just a movie about a guy you refuses to grow up and make something more of himself, but it’s also a film about a guy caught between his best friend and the woman he loves.

Mila Kunis is really fantastic in TED as Lori, the girlfriend who’s “too good” for John (according to her friends) but genuinely loves him in spite of all his flaws. She’s got a successful, professional gig and a boss (Joel McHale) who constantly hits on her. Lori isn’t looking to radically change John, but she is looking for him to advance a little. It’s to the film’s credit that Ted is such a real character that when she wants John to tell Ted to move out, we don’t immediately think, “You’re kicking a teddy bear out of your house?” Instead, I was on her side. Ted, after all, greeted John and Lori’s return home with the image of him sitting on a couch with four hookers – one of whom had taken a sh*t on the carpet. That’s not funny (or acceptable) to Lori, but she does think its funny when John drops a massive fart in a bar. Her final straw with John is when she’s understandably furious when he ditches her boss’ party to go hang out with Flash Gordon at Ted’s place.

Ah, Flash.

Or is that … Flash, ah ha!

Yes. Yes, it is.

I knew TED had an appearance from Sam Jones, the actor who played Flash in the classic 1980 movie, but I was unaware at how large a role Sam had. Flash is one of the movies that Ted and John bond over as kids, and it’s Sam’s appearance at Ted’s party that convinces John he has to exit the party at Lori’s boss’ house to go do shots with Jones.

There’s plenty of crude jokes sprinkled throughout the film – plenty of them sexual. Ted is forced to get a job after he moves out of John and Lori’s place and he’s rude at the job interview and then rude once he gets the job, telling his boss how last week he had sex on some asparagus and then sold it. Instead of being horrified, his boss (Bill Smitrovich) keeps promoting him. There’s jokes about sex with Norah Jones (“Thanks for 9/11,” is the most hilariously inappropriate joke of the movie on two levels) and sex without a penis and they often generate the biggest laughs, but it’s the smaller jokes built around John and Lori’s relationship that win me over.

When Lori is out on a date with her boss, Ted gets Norah Jones to allow John to sing a song during her concert at the Hatch Shell in an attempt to win Lori back. The song John sings is a song from the movie they watched the night they met – the theme from Octopussy. John butchers Rita Coolidge’s “All Time High” and the crowd turns on him, booing him offstage. Lori’s boss rips John in the parking lot, but Lori neither joins in mocking John nor runs back to him. It’s small moments like this that help to make the characters in TED feel real – even if they’re a walking, talking, cocaine-snorting teddy bear.

I’ve long stopped looking for the funniest movie ever. I like Hangover II almost as much as The Hangover because I like the characters and because the story’s good, even if it’s not as funny. I really like TED. It’s not the funniest movie ever, but it is funny and I really like hanging out with John, Lori, and Ted. Giovanni Ribisi provides just enough creepiness to give the film a shot of darkness and Mark Wahlberg proves again that while he is definitely not the most wide-ranging actor on the planet (or in whatever room he’s standing in), if you give him a role that plays to his strengths he’s a blast to watch. It all adds up to a very enjoyable film.

Plus, it reminds us we’d all be better off if Patrick Stewart narrated our life story.

I know he allows me to believe in magic.

And Apache helicopters.

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.