X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Release Date: May 26, 2006
Fun fact: this was the last film that I
saw at the cinema in Bangor before it closed down. At the time, I thought it
was great, but alas, time has not been terribly kind to it.
The mutant lot in life has improved
since the last film. The new president is more sympathetic towards mutants, and
a mutant has a prominent position in government: Beast, who’s mutation (he’s
covered in blue fur) is as visible as you can get. The X-Men aren’t feeling too
good about that though, since they’re still coming to terms with the death of
Jean Grey. Cyclops took her death particularly hard, but he starts to hear
Jean’s voice again. He rushes off to Alkali Lake and finds Jean, having somehow
survived drowning. They celebrate by kissing like horny teenagers, but Jean
can’t handle the excitement. Professor Xavier senses a great disturbance in the
Force, and sends Wolverine and Storm to follow Cyclops. When they get to Alkali
Lake, they find an unconscious Jean and take her home. Poor Cyclops has been
unceremoniously killed off-screen, angering his fans who are mad at Cyclops
getting shafted.
Back at the Mansion, Xavier explains
that he sensed Jean’s extreme power level when he first met her as a teenager
(she is the only known Class 5 Mutant apparently,) and the power gave her a
more malevolent personality called the Phoenix that has no control over its
massive power. Xavier responded by building mental blocks to lock away the
Phoenix, preventing Jean from using her powers to their full potential.
Pretty much this, except it would be called Jean and have Famke Janssen in it instead of Scarlett Johansson.
Wolverine gets angry at Xavier for not
giving Jean a choice in the matter and prevents him from putting the mental
blocks back. Jean thanks him by trying to have sex with Wolverine (Way to shaft
Cyclops again guys,) but she gets upset at remembering she killed Cyclops and
runs away. Angry as he is at Wolverine, Xavier is still too classy to say “I
told you so.”
Meanwhile, another plot runs alongside
the Phoenix storyline. A pharmaceutical company has managed to create a mutant
cure, using the DNA of a young boy named Jimmy, who can neutralize mutant DNA
when near other mutants. Mystique infiltrated the pharmaceutical company to
find this out for Magneto, but was captured and arrested. Magneto and Pyro
break her out of the prison convoy, along with two new recruits for the
Brotherhood in the form of Mystique’s fellow prisoners: Multiple Man, who can
create clones of himself, as the name suggests, and the Juggernaut Bitch, who
is the Juggernaut Bitch and is unstoppable once he’s gathered momentum. In the
chaos, Mystique is shot with a cure gun, making her human. Magneto coldly
leaves her behind, but the cure gun is the last straw. Magneto builds an army
of mutants to prepare for open war.
Meanwhile again, not everyone is as
against the cure as Magneto. Rogue wants to be able to touch people without
almost killing them, and she feels that Bobby is drifting away from her and
towards fellow trainee Kitty Pryde. When Bobby and Kitty go ice skating after
Bobby asks “Do you want to build a snowman?” a heartbroken Rogue leaves.
Back to the Phoenix plot. Jean has been
tracked down to her old house by the X-Men, but Magneto is there too, thanks to
his new pal Callisto, who can sense energy. Magneto derails Xavier’s attempts
at calming Jean down by persuading her to use her full power (“Get outta my
head, Charles!”), while the Juggernaut Bitch battles Wolverine to stop him from
interfering. (“Silly bitch, your weapons cannot harm me. I’m the Juggernaut
Bitch!”) Wolverine gets away from the Juggernaut Bitch just long enough to see
Jean lift her house up into the sky and disintegrates Xavier with mind bullets.
On that note, Jean becomes Dark Phoenix and joins the Brotherhood. Her role is
to stand in the background looking moody, have an affinity for red leather, and
of course mind bullet disintegrations.
With Xavier gone, Magneto puts his plan
in motion. Fancying himself as a bit of a fixer-upper, Multiple Man acts as a
decoy to lure away the army, while Magneto’s real forces attack Alcatraz, where
the cure is being manufactured and kill Jimmy. That job falls to the Juggernaut
Bitch, but he is stopped by Kitty Pryde. Before he can threaten to kill her and
rape her and eat her fucking costume, Kitty Pryde and Jimmy trick the
Juggernaut Bitch into knocking himself out. (If only Pimp Cane Padrino or
Ketchup had been there, the Juggernaut Bitch would have stood a chance...)
Callisto and Storm get into a fight outside, which ends when Storm throws
Callisto onto a fence and electrifies it. “Do you know what happens to a
power-level-detecting goth when it’s struck by lightning? The same thing that
happens to everything else! LOLXD #YoloNoob”
Bobby knocks out Pyro with his
strengthening ice powers overpowering Pyro’s fire controlling powers. With the
rest of Magneto’s named lackeys running inside to bully some defenceless
scientists, only Maggy himself is left to deal with. Colossus throws Wolverine
towards Magneto to act as a decoy, while Beast sneaks up behind him and injects
him with the cure. The army arrives after everything’s been
sorted, and start shooting the place up anyway.
Jean gets mad and decides to let it go.
She can’t hold it back any more. Her disintegrating mind bullets wreck the
collective shit of the army, the island, Magneto’s cowardly minions who were
beating up scientists instead of helping fight the X-Men, and even gravity.
(As far as we know, the Juggernaut Bitch
is still in the building when this happens. “And in this corner, the welterweight
champion, The Juggernaut Bitch! Why the fuck is this shit fallin’?”) However,
thanks to the wonderful technology of indestructible trousers, Wolverine is
able to get close enough to Jean to kill her. For the first time in forever,
the X-Men have a time of peace ahead of them. The now-depowered Rogue gets back
together with Bobby, who has realized that his relationship with Kitty Pryde
isn’t going anywhere because she’s a lesbian. Luckily for him, love is an open
door and Rogue is willing to forgive. While everyone else is getting back on
their feet, Xavier has somehow transported his consciousness into a comatose
body, and Magneto is in the park playing chess against himself. As he reaches
for one of the metal pieces, it shakes ever so slightly…
The main problem with the film is how
crowded it is. The Phoenix plot and the cure plot would both be sufficient
material for their own films, but squashing the two together does neither story
justice. It doesn’t help that this film is actually shorter than the first two,
despite having so much material to go through. It could have really done with
either being at least half an hour longer to give the two stories more
breathing room, or staying at the current length and dropping one storyline to
concentrate fully on the other. There’s little crossover between the two
plotlines, which means they’re mostly separate from one another. The most
noticeable example would be the finale, where Dark Phoenix doesn’t go nuts
until after the cure plot and Magneto are resolved. It doesn’t connect to the
cure and instead feels like a second climax, which isn’t a good thing in this
case, as we haven’t had a chance to breathe after Magneto’s defeat yet, causing
fatigue to start to set in. The reason for using two A-story tier plots may be
that this was originally intended as the grand finale, and they were both used
because there wouldn’t be another chance to use the unused storyline. This also
explains the rampant character death/depowering. Of course, this left Fox with
egg on their faces when the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit big and they had to
furiously backpedal to get the franchise to a point where they could carry on
with it.
The bloat can similarly be seen in the
cast roster. There are a lot of new characters introduced here. Beast, Angel,
Kitty Pryde and the Juggernaut Bitch are just the newcomers the marketing
focused on. There are plenty more besides, and even among those four, Angel is
a minor character in the grand scheme of things. His role is minor enough that
I didn’t mention him in the plot summary. As a consequence, most don’t get much
screen time or plot relevance, preventing them from standing out. While the
newcomers allied with the X-Men are pretty good (Kelsey Grammer as Beast is a
wonderful piece of casting), the new Brotherhood members are laughable. Multiple
Man is wasted, as the film forgets about him almost as soon as he appears.
Seriously, he’s gone halfway through the convoy scene. Did he go outside for a
smoke while Magneto and Pyro let out Mystique and the Juggernaut Bitch or
something? He only comes back to act as a decoy later, and be cured off screen.
Callisto, Arclight and Psylocke are difficult to tell apart, and Psylocke
doesn’t do anything, so there’s no reason for her to be there besides ticking a
popular character off the checklist. Not to mention that Multiple Man and
Psylocke are usually protagonists. At least Multiple Man has the excuse of
being a villain in the Ultimate Marvel continuity. Psylocke on the other is
Psylocke in name only, with everything else being based on another character,
Kwannon, who switched bodies with Psylocke. It’s a long story. Despite all
that, the Hedgehog Guy stands out as the worst of the bunch. He has the power
of making tiny little spikes on his body, which is honestly useless. The one
time it proves of any use is stabbing a scientist that he had to hold up next
to his body, yet he’s constantly bigging himself up as being so great. Since no
attention is drawn to his attitude by any of the other characters, and there
are no jokes at his expense, I can only assume the Hedgehog Guy was supposed to be taken
seriously, yet I can’t do that. This guy being one of Magneto’s top henchmen
makes Magneto look bad, as if he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for
Brotherhood applicants. I’m sure he’s missing Toad and Sabretooth right about
now. The Juggernaut Bitch is the only one who stands out as being in any way a
threat, and even then I’ve spent the entire review making a mockery of him.
One more for the road.
Another problem is that time that could
have been given to developing the new characters is instead used to show off
how great Wolverine is. The franchise is often accused of showing favouritism
towards Wolverine, but this is the first time the Wolverine shilling is
blatant. Characters like Cyclops and Professor Xavier are shown as being wrong
or incompetent while Wolverine is always right and always involved in
whatever’s happening, and Wolverine is the one who saves the day at the end.
True, giving Jean Grey Phoenix-resistant mental blocks without her consent is
not okay, but as Xavier points out, it was the lesser of two evils, and Jean
goes on to show in the climax that Xavier was justified in his concerns. If
Xavier had properly explained what could happen if her powers were left
unchecked, Jean may well have agreed to the blocks herself, but he can’t do
that because it would prove Wolverine wrong, and we can’t be having that now,
can we?
On the plus side, the special effects are
phenomenal. At the time of the film’s release, it was among the most expensive
films ever made, and every bit of that money can be seen on screen. The
standouts in this regard are Magneto stealing the Golden Gate Bridge, and
anything to do with the Phoenix. You’re getting a lot of bang for your buck,
that’s for sure. The performances are also as good as ever. Special praise goes
to Ian McKellen as Magneto, who lifts the film whenever he’s on screen. Some of
the film’s best scenes are small scenes with Magneto talking to other
characters, such as chastising Pyro for speaking ill of Xavier after his death,
or the marks and needles discussion. While Anna Paquin as Rogue sits out the
action sequences this time around, she gets a moral dilemma over whether or not
to take the cure. Her chat with Wolverine about the cure is heartwarming, and
given their friendship established in the first film, Wolverine having the
answers actually is appropriate here, as it isn’t shilling him by making Rogue
look bad.
To conclude, X-Men: The Last Stand is a
film of two halves. There’s certainly plenty to talk about, as this is the
longest entry yet. The overall package may not be as satisfying as the first
two films, but there are great scenes here that are on the level of the first
two films in quality. The prologue showing a young Angel self-harming is a good
example, and I’ve pointed out others as well. The cure storyline is the logical
progression for the themes of the series in general, so it is disappointing
that it has to fight for limited screen time with another plot. This may be a
controversial opinion, but while I do agree that it isn’t as good as the first two,
I suspect that I liked X-Men: The Last Stand more than most.
Here's the deal with the Juggernaut Bitch, in case anyone's wondering.
Stan Lee Spotter: Stan Lee appears in
the prologue as a man watering his garden. Chris Claremont, who wrote the Dark
Phoenix Saga in the comics, is his neighbour, who is mowing the lawn. R Lee
Ermey, Hollywood’s definitive army actor cameos as – you guessed it – an army
officer. He orders the soldiers to collect their plastic weapons and get ready
to fight Magneto.
Next Time:
Bonus: The novelization is a bit more
merciful with regards to the body count. Pyro is shown to survive as Bobby
carries his unconscious body away with him when Alcatraz is evacuated, and when
Jean starts going crazy, Psylocke says “Sod this, I’m outta here” and teleports
away, leaving Arclight and the Hedgehog Guy to be disintegrated by Jean’s mind
bullets. In the film, Pyro’s fate is left ambiguous after Bobby knocks him out,
while Psylocke dies along with the other two members of the Terrible Trio.
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