Alright everyone, we finally come to the last film for the X-men marathon. Let's finish going through all these films to date with X-Men: The Last Stand.
Plot: After the events of the second film, the government has become allies with the X-Men - helping with chasing Magneto and Mystique, and not going after the mutant population as a whole. But when a young mutant boy possess the power to take away, Worthington Labs uses him to develop a cure that can suppress the powers of the mutants, offering to cure anyone who wants it. Meanwhile, the X-Men find Jean Grey alive but becoming dangerous to everyone around her resulting in her accidentally killing Cyclops and joining forces with Magneto.
Now as far as what generally happens in the movie, it's fairly good. Because with this movie we see the world of mutants expand more then it ever did in X2, some characters like Colossus and Kitty Pride a.k.a. Shadowcat (but I think most of us like calling her just Kitty Pryde) get more screen time, we finally get the war that Magneto and Professor X have been talking about throughout the last two films, we even go into Jean Grey with her alternate personality known as Phoenix. All of this and a little more shows that X-Men: The Last Stand for the most part has the right story to make a great, effective film to finish the X-Men trilogy. Unfortunetly, how they execute it, doesn't leave people quite as satisfied as everybody would really like it to be. The more common reason why is that while it all wasn't done in a "oh dear heaven no!" kind of bad way, it ended up lacking the atmosphere, emotion and all around soul that the first two movies had. Matthew Vaughn especially who was originally suppose to direct the movie pointed out that he did the script and all that before he dropped out and that his version of The Last Stand would've been 40 minutes longer and would've had more emotion and heart and that this one didn't really let the drama and the emotions just play. This was something that I more or less felt when I first saw this movie a couple of years ago. And while I wasn't too much into X-Men at the time, even after seeing this again where I've become a little more into it in term of both comics and TV, I was left admitting that it was lacking in the right kind of atmosphere and emotion that otherwise would've made this film a really big finale. One of the reasons I felt this way had to with the characters. Now while I do feel that there was development to some of them that worked or was done fairly well such as Wolverine, Beast and Storm, and how they interacted with each other, what was happening to everyone else among the X-Men was kind of off or not necessary. Main examples would be 1) Cyclops for one didn't really get much of a death. 2) Kitty and Cyclops sadly enough didn't have a whole lot of development even though they've become new members of the X-Men and it seemed like the right thing to do, to go into them even more after they were more noticeably introduced in X2. 3) throughout the film, there is a love triangle between Iceman, Kitty and Rouge that came out of no where, made little sense considering Rouge and Iceman's relationship during the second film, and was altogether not very emotional and kind of forced, and 4) the last scene with Professor X should've been really emotional, but with the lack of emotion and even music left what happened as something to just look at and go "Well alight then." then really having an emotion for it. Oh and just on a more personal note, I dislike what they did with Juggernaut with him not really acting serious and how his costume looked really stupid - especially with the helmet. The other reason is the climax at the very end which for the most part had great action, but not only did it not have a lot of emotion, it was a little confusing at what was happening during the first half of the final battle.
And that's my review for X-Men: The Last Stand. It had the right story and had some decent action, but it was made without the right atmosphere and emotion to let everything that happens concerning drama, characters or the climax just let it go and sink in and therefore make the whole thing a great way to finish the trilogy. Some people like Doug Walker will consider that it does anyway and view it as a guilty pleasure, but it's otherwise the weakest of the trilogy, and the second weakest X-Men film all around (unless you're among the people who treat Wolverine Origins like it doesn't exist at all.)
So that's all the X-Men films to date reviewed. Watching all of them again inducing First Class, it's a very mixed but otherwise enjoyable franchise. The trilogy on a whole was a well done way to introduce the whole world of X-Men despite whatever flaws each film had, Wolverine Origins had one or two interesting ideas but was otherwise just clumsy, and First Class has a couple of things that leave you confused about how it's suppose to connect with the trilogy but is otherwise a very smart and thought of prequel that succeeded in expanding the X-Men universe in film a little bit more. And now during the next 11 months we have The Wolverine during the end of July and X-Men: Days of Future Past as a sequel to First Class and technically The Last Stand. Both upcoming films can be great ways to help X-Men give us great films again as First Class started to do for the most part - while also becoming great parts of phase two of Marvel's films in general. But will they succeed? Tune in a month from now as we will begin to find out with The Wolverine.
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