X-Meh:United We Bland

I went to the Boston Common Lowes this morning to go see X-Men: The Last Stand. I was fairly excited about it; I liked the other two and I expected good things from this one too. On the way to the theater, I stopped in at CVS and picked up a bag of Sour Patch Kids. I need to have Sour Patch Kids with me when I see a movie, it was just a habit but it has morphed into a requisite ritual for movie watching. As I approached the theater, I was surprised to see a sizable crowd gathered in front, awaiting the opening of the doors. This surely should have been a good sign. No one shows up early in the morning for the first showing of a bad movie, right?
So I get a coffee, find my seat, and settle in for the move. After a seemingly hour-long barrage of previews and commercials, the movie finally begins. It starts off cool, with a flashback of a much younger(and walking) professor X and Magneto visiting an adolescent and extremely powerfuly Jean Grey. It's a good look at how powerful Jean may become, as she using telekenisis to lift a dozen cars while in the first movie she could barely move a pencil.
So at the end of the second X-men movie, Jean sacrificed herself to save everyone else. Everyone knew she was coming back, the giant phoenix in the water was not the subtlest of hints. But her actual return was rather uninteresting. Cyclops is all depressed and moody at the mansion, and he starts getting telepathic messages calling him to Alkali Lake. So he shows up, blast the water with his eyes, Jean pops out all veiny evil-willow looking, kisses him, and then apparently blasts him to dust off camera.
So in the Movie, the "Phoenix" is Jean's subconcious, which is angry and chaotic and far more powerful that Jean's controlled, concious personality. This is a departure from the comic, where the Phoenix is an extra terrestrial force, and I am totally cool with that. I am not the type of fanatic that jumps up in arms when a movie deviates from the source material. For example, I actually like the changes made to the story in the Lord of the Rings movie, such as the changing of Faramir's character and the expansion of Arwen's role. It made for a more dramatic movie. And don't get me started about Blade Runner. Blade Runner is an incredible sci-fi noir, and the movie bears only a passing resemblence to the PKD story it's based on, Do Androids Dream of Electic Sheep. It's not a bad story, but the characters in the book are freakishly obsessed with animals and their lead cod pieces to protect thier genitals from radiation. Some elements are there, like the replicants and the main character, but the tone is very different. My issue is with how they chose to incoporate the Phoenix concept is that they had a good idea that could have made for a great movie, it just wasn't developed enough for us to really care or even have a sense of what was going on in Jean's head.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of cool stuff in this movie. Beast looks great, and Kelsey Grammer was the perfect casting for him. Angel looks cool, and it seems like he is going to be a significant part of the story but I think he has about 3 lines in total. The mutant cure, plucked basically wholesale from Joss Whedon's Astonishing, is a great focal point for the story. The Iceman/Kitty Pride/Rogue love triangle was vaguely amusing. The danger room looked cool, with a holographic Sentinel. "I'm the Juggernaut, Bitch!" got a huge laugh from all the nerds in the audience. The totally unnecessary but quite cool looking moving of the Golden Gate bridge was reasonably impressive on a let's-see-what-ridiculousness-we-can- pull-off-today-with-CGI level. Magneto has some good moments, including losing his powers. There is a fairly cool sequel setting up scene at the end of the credits. And I even appreciated the somewhat cheesy looking live-action fastball special.
Where the movie fails is in its incorporation of all these elements into a cohesive story with characters and events we can care about. If the movie makers cut the number superfluous sub-plots in half and instead developed two or three of the main character arcs with more depth it could have been a stronger movie. The unceremonious blowing up of Cyclops off camera, the disintigration of Professor X, and the stabbing death of Jean Grey were a little excessive and a bit ineffective dramatically. That said, I did like this movie and can recommend it to anyone who liked the first two. It is not perfect, but it does pack in a whole bunch of cool stuff into two hours and there are far worse ways to spend your time.
Well, that is enough ranting for now.