X-Men 3
For several weeks prior to its release, I had several pseudo-arguments with a friend of mine about what sort of film X-Men 3 was going to be. Her contention was that it was going to be good -- I mean, the second one was really surprisingly good, right? And I mean, come on, Patrick Stewart. And Ian McKellen! Come on! Those guys make anything worth watching. Plus, this one has Colossus and Beast, and they're two of your top three X-Men (with Nightcrawler holding steady at #1). What more reason do you need?
And yes, I have to admit that those are all good reasons. I mean, pretty much all you have to say is Patrick Stewart and I'm pretty much sold. Yet, I continued to argue that the movie was going to, and I say this as a technical term, suck balls. Namely because of the absence of the extremely capable Bryan Singer and the presence of Rush Hour's resident crap peddler, Brett Ratner. Has he ever done anything even close to good? Let me answer that for you: No, he has not.
Yet, I wanted to like this movie. Even with my constant assertions that it would be terrible, I really didn't want it to be. It's that thing where I lower my expectations so that even a mediocre movie is enjoyable. Secretly, I wanted to like it. I was trying to build myself up toward liking it.
So imagine how disappointing it was to discover that the movie, to put it technically, sucked all kinds of balls.
Let's start with the small stuff.
The movie had horrible dialogue. Like, chokingly bad, turn around to the people behind me to see if they just heard the same thing I did dialogue. And yes, I realize that a summer action movie's dialogue isn't supposed to be so eloquent that it makes my brain jump out of my head because it realizes it can never write anything that clever, but surely it's got to be better than Professor X telling Storm that "You know better than anyone how quickly the weather can change." I mean, Jesus Christ. I hope he read her mind right after that so he could hear her thinking, "Why does he say shit like that?"
Also, mutants suddenly had new, unexplained powers. Storm can somehow now shoot lightning bolts out of her hands like the Emperor from Star Wars! Wolverine is now entirely indestructible! Pyro can shoot fire all over the fucking place!
Not to mention that nobody was in character. Granted, some people like Jean Grey weren't supposed to be, but that doesn't explain the people who haven't come back from the dead. Let's enumerate: Wolverine is now the most clear-headed and reasonable person of the bunch, and he never gets mad about anything. Okay. Professor X is suddenly really secretive and standoffish, and really ineloquent, even. Um...sure. Storm is now really assertive about everything. And I mean everything. "I want...a Mountain Dew!" Cyclops is now really dumb and nobody cares about him. *SPOILER* "He's dead? Let's have a pizza party!" */SPOILER*
Hey! Here's an idea! Let's kill off important characters for the shock value of it! Even though the movie would make a lot more sense and have a lot more impact later on if those characters were actually around later on to witness the big setpiece ending, it'll totally rock people to see them explode and shit. Yeah. And then let's introduce a bunch of new characters like Kitty Pryde and Angel, and give them negligible screentime! Shit, this is awesome!
Here's my theory: The script was written over the course of two hour-long drinking binges over two days. That pretty much takes care of all the problems. Major plot problems. Like, if Magneto could pick up the Golden Gate Bridge, why didn't he just drop that on the facility he wanted to destroy instead of dropping it in front of it and raiding it? Or what exactly did the X-Men plan to do when they got to the facility? Stop Magneto and then just let the military shoot them with the weaponized cure? I would rather they just said, "Hey, we have to be there for the big final setpiece action sequence! We'd better go!"
That said, Patrick Stewart (even with what little onscreen time he got and his horrible dialogue) and Ian McKellen were quite good. And the thing I was most worried about -- Kelsey Grammer as beast -- ended up being the least offensive thing in the whole movie. And somehow they managed to get a pretty decent Magneto character arc out of the thing, even though it was the only one worth even shitting on. And it's the only reason I'll be so generous as to give this thing a plain old D.
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