In which Mirabella reviews X-Men 3
The Summary: A drug corporation has developed a “cure” for mutant-ness. Ian McKellen cares, but pretty much no one else does. Characterization arcs are picked up and put down as if the director were an unenthusiastic guy shopping for his mother’s birthday present in Bath & Body Works, and Jean Grey is resurrected as a mutant revenant whose superpower is staring glassily into space and wearing funky contacts. Oh, and people die, with and without falling rocks.
The Good:
- Aaron Stanford’s Pyro was a joy in the last movie and is a joy here too, chewing the scenery with malevolent glee and determined to make the most of his supervillain apprenticeship; too bad his fight with Bobby, which should have been… well, better than it was, was so strongly reminiscent of the graveyard fight between Harry and Voldemort except without any of the elements that made that scene even marginally interesting. I have to say, too - I was totally not viewing this movie with the slash goggles on, but he and Bobby have such a wonderful “Don’t want me, huh? Then I will see you DEAD DEAD DEAD AND SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE AHAHAHA!” dynamic going. The scene between them on the picket line is a thing to behold.
- Some of the new mutants are kind of cool, in a blink-and-you-miss-it way, like the drug corporation czar’s son, whose mutant power is having huge wings and a good enough agent that the advertising makes him look like he has an actual role.
- Um, that scene where Jean and Wolverine are tearing each other’s clothes off is pretty damn hot too, I tell you what. Possibly it benefits from being the only moment in the movie when either of them is awake and paying attention.
- Ian McKellen has a gift for being the high point of any movie, and he does it again here, though he’s sorely tried. There are nice glimpses of his relationship with Charles Xavier, and he and Patrick Stewart between them manage to forge just about the only moments of real human connection in the entire movie.
The bad:
- Oy. Yeah, see, this may take a while, because X3 isn’t a terrible movie like Elektra was a terrible movie, but lord, it isn’t good. Not one of the main actors seems enthused about the project. Even Ian McKellen seems bored to tears, and God love him, it takes a hell of a lot to bore that man. Hugh Jackman, who really brought some good energy to the role in the last two movies, here is pretty clearly walking the lines and cashing the paycheck. Kelsey Grammer, who plays a big blue guy with no discernable purpose in the movie, looks like he wandered onto the wrong soundstage, got slapped into the makeup before he could wake up enough to protest, and hasn’t yet been allowed to call his agent to extricate him.
- New mutants come and go with about six seconds of screen time apiece and most of them fail spectacularly to make any sort of impression; even Kitty, who manages to wrest Bobby away from the colorless and annoying Rogue, is a cipher. This is a shame, because that guy who could clone himself? I would totally have watched an entire movie just about him. He has one scene, and one line in that scene, and he owns it.
- Jean Grey has annoyed me for three movies now, and she shows no signs of letting up. Her powers have grown exponentially and are now out of control, and she seems to have killed Scott, who was also colorless and annoying but deserved better. Do we see her struggling with this? Well, not really, but she glowers a lot.
- This is not so much The Bad as The Weird: apparently when you transplant your consciousness into someone else’s body you take your alarmingly copious chest fur with you.
- The movie raises some interesting ethical issues - Rogue takes the cure and gives up her mutant power, for instance - but they just never seem to connect as interesting issues, or even human issues. They’re plot devices, nothing more, and not even the scriptwriters seem to be actually interested in them. Explosions by themselves cannot carry a movie.
The Bottom Line: I don’t advise against seeing it, per se, but for god’s sake go to a matinee. At the dollar theater. You’ll still be watching a soulless waste of huge amounts of collective acting talent, but at least it won’t put a hole in your wallet to do it.
June 5th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Watching this I thought ,”Since when did being a mutant mean you can jump really really high?” and “Is it necessary to dress like a really sullen goth when you’re a mutant?” and also “since when do above STMG(surly teen mutant goths) expect a really old man to have a tattoo?”. And i must apologise on behalf of my country for Vinnie Jones. Bad.
June 7th, 2006 at 12:41 am
Yeah, that tattoo thing really sort of came out of nowhere. That chick’s all “WHEREZ UR TATU OMG???” and I’m like “Um… is there some reason you think he would have one?” I assume it makes more sense if you’ve read the comics, but still.
June 10th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Blargh. This movie makes me wish I had time for the comics.
I loved the first two movies to death — being a rather unsopisticated moviegoer helps keep me happy, I guess, but I still maintain they were pretty good.
Possibly because Ian McKellan did not have cheesy lines like “What have I done?” in them.
X-3 felt like it could have been three movies all their own. I’m only passingly familiar with the comic canon, so I can’t really address the differences, but everywhere you turn in that movie are big huge gaping unresolved issues that you were teased with mercilessly but never got to see explored. The entire thing felt really, really rushed.
As far as Beast goes — I was delighted to see him and I do actually think he was played well, but you hit the truth of it — he had very little point in being there. Same as Archangel, who was very, very pretty and very, very useless, except for saving the ambiguously villanous but well-meaning cause of everyone’s problems .
Cyclops, who I’ve always found pretty boring, did have an excellent line — and that was about the extent of his involvement in the film. Attempting to look pretty while crying doesn’t count. Having some kind of, I don’t know, EFFECT on people would have, but that apparently didn’t really happen. Boring as he was, he was still mildly important.
Jean Grey. I am so glad someone finds her as uninteresting as I do. There’s one scene with her that I found interesting (other than the bit with Wolverine in the med room…), and that was when the Professor and Magneto come to get her and they find her sitting in a small chair in the corner. There was something very classically horror-movie about that, but I can’t decide if I liked it.
Possibly the most annoying thing about the movie was Halle Berry and her Storm. I don’t remember who said it, but someone described the movie as “The Super Adventures of Wolverine and Storm” and they do rather carry the movie. What I find more annoying is that I heard tell that Halle Berry was leaving the movie when she found out that Storm would have a relatively average part and no spectacular character development. Changing the plot of the film to make Storm more important (and possibly a pay raise as well, I can’t recall) mollified her. I’m not sure if this was for the better, especially with that truly hideous hair she was sporting. And her completely flat performance.
Wolverine, who I admit to always favouring, did okay. I don’t think he quite hit average — I want to believe that he did a little better than that, buit he vertainly lost something since X-2.
All in all — I think I’d rather learn more about the comics.
August 13th, 2007 at 1:52 am
Thank you.
For so clearly defining what was so wrong with that movie.
We’ve talked about it at work and most agree that the Single Biggest Mistake (out side of the Storm thing) is that Hollywood got a hold of it, and they tried to condense Three Major (and about four minor) X-Men story lines in to one 3hr movie. What resulted was a movie that had NO congruent storyline, or even made you care about the characters.
I’m sorry but not all of the morlocs would have looked at home in a heavy metal moshpit.
It’s nice to know that some one else picked up on the actors showing-up-saying-lines-cashing-paycheck feel to it.