Let me start by admitting that I was an enormous X-fan back in the early-90’s, so my expectations for any X-Men movie are already high. Bryan Singer did a great job with the first two films, choosing to film scripts based more on character development and less around action set-pieces.
Singer left the series to direct the new Superman movie and the audience got Brett Ratner. Brett Ratner has always been an uninspired director who could make a competent and entertaining film but who lacked any sort of flair or sense of individuality. For this reason, my expectations coming into the third film were not as high as they were for the first film.
The movie starts off with Professor X stepping out of a car with Magneto in tow, an obvious indication that the scene takes place in the past. They are at Jean Grey’s house to talk to her parents and try to have her attend Xavier’s school. After the credits, the modern day X-Men are seen fighting an enormous robot - one of the Sentinels, for those in the know. The fight is really a part of their training in the mansion’s danger room.
The movie proceeds apace as many little, quick incidents are woven together – so many that it would be time consuming and gratuitous to list them all. There is no pause as each scene takes anywhere between 30 seconds to one minute (not including the action set-pieces, of course); suffice it to say, it’s a very MTV generation film. There are some major character deaths or disappearances and yet no real character development.
Whoever decided to greenlight this movie with Ratner directing and a completely worthless script made an enormous error. The style and substance, or what there was of it, is gone. This film is too fast-paced, at a lean 104 minutes, to give any character even a modicum of development and this makes it hard to watch without sighing. It feels like somebody basted the turkey but forget to put it in the oven before serving it. And a turkey it is.
The script is incredibly bad, as I’ve just noted, but the direction also hurts the movie substantially. Ratner has made fun films in the past, but they are by no means films of quality or substance. His choices in this film, like in his other films, are obvious decisions with the camera placed in obvious positions. Ratner is sometimes good at mimicking other directors abilities, but he misses the Singer mark by a wide margin. The darkness of the visuals is a stab in the right direction, but it merely serves to make the film harder to watch since the film never achieves the dark mood necessary to accompany by a lowly lit film.
Accompanying Ratner’s bland style is a completely overused and simultaneously anti-climatic score. The music is not the anthem it needs to be: we’re talking about superheroes here so where’s the super-powered score?
The movie’s not all bad though, as the visual effects are spectacular with the final sequence with the Dark Phoenix unleashed as a highlight. The mutants are finally given the opportunity to make their powers fit the scope of an X-Men film. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is so bad that it only serves to illustrate the potential of the film. If the scope of Ratner’s battles could be combined with Singer’s character development and style, then you’d have a truly excellent adaptation of the books.
In the end, the film’s an overproduced mish-mash of hodgepodge with no substance. It’s a shame really, because the characters and the story behind them have a fantastic history, but this film merely nods to them. Since there are solo movies based on some of these characters in the pipeline, I think it’s probably safe to say good riddance to this series for the time being – if they do decide to resurrect it, let’s hope it’s with a better script, better direction and better music.
GRADE: D