X-Men: The Last Stand sucks.

There’s no hot take incoming. Nothing about how it actually does a lot of things right and it deserves to be recognized. This film actively detracts from the legacy built by the first two films. It starts off okay and gets worse and worse as time goes on.

X-Men: The Last Stand starts off with a flashback and then a scene in the Danger Room. We get a glimpse of the Sentinels, and the classic Fastball Special maneuver. But then it’s all downhill from there. By the end, we’ve got Vinnie Jones quoting terrible internet memes unironically.

The Mutant Metaphor in X-Men: The Last Stand

This film destroys the carefully crafted allegorical elements built up by the previous films. Honestly, it spits on the work done previously to make mutants an effective metaphor for real-world minorities. That’s not to say, however, that the metaphor has been abandoned completely. The allegory still exists and is invoked, but is implemented with far less consistency and coherence.

You would think, based on the early scenes, that this film would be an effective vector to deliver social commentary. After all, it was true of the first two movies. The first flashback scene, as a weeping Angel mutilates himself and tries to hide his mutant gift from his father, delivers the emotional content of the father-son relationship incredibly well. The elder Warren’s focus zeroes in on his son being a mutant. This results in a bloodied child tearfully apologizing to the father that forced him to self-harm. This aspect holds up well through the scene where a mutant cure is almost administered to Warren against his wishes.

The Problem of the Cure in X-Men: The Last Stand

But then the film gets to the main conflict. A private company has developed the aforementioned mutant cure, making it available to mutants who voluntarily choose to take it. This serves as a point of contention early in the film, but does not incite violence on its own. Things get bad when everybody discovers the government has weaponized the cure in the form of a syringe gun. The rest of the film follows Magneto’s attempts to destroy the cure.

Pro-Tip for the writers behind X-Men: The Last Stand:

When writing an allegorical representation of real-world minority groups, don’t construct your story in such a way that the minority is painted as the evil aggressor when compared to a group ACTIVELY ATTEMPTING GENOCIDE AGAINST THEM. That’s what happens in this film. The X-Men protect a corporation and a government that are conspiring to exterminate them against a group of freedom fighters. The writers bend over backwards to paint Magneto as a villain, but they should’ve never approached this story. Days of Future Past goes on to explicitly show that Magneto was right about the threats facing the mutants.

I’m going to end this section before I go off on a thesis-length rant over how hard they botched this story.

tl;dr- Don’t make your stand-in for a marginalized group the greater villain when compared to state-sanctioned genocide.

But even after that, we have the problem of Jean Grey.

Dark Phoenix

Jean Grey deserved better than what X-Men: The Last Stand gave her.

This film reveals that Professor Xavier partitioned off part of Jean’s mind when she was a child. That part formed into a completely separate personality with full control of her powers. When she appeared to die in X2, that portion of her mind resurfaced and saved her.

But rather than mining this development for GOOD character drama by exploring Jean’s headspace and the dynamic between the two versions of the character, this film elects to simply show off the “Evil” Jean AKA the Phoenix. Jean becomes an antagonist, but she’s more a plot device than a real villain. And ultimately, Jean dies. For real, this time.

Honestly, I find Jean Grey’s treatment in this film outright offensive. She had two entire films where her character arc revolved around her risking everything to do the right thing. In doing so, she came to control more and more of her power.

But in this film, her power becomes too much for her to control. The real Jean loses all agency, becoming subject to the man-made splinter personality inside her. It’s like the anti-Captain Marvel. A man realizes a woman can’t be trusted with the power destiny gave her and sets out to limit it. The power still consumes the woman, so a different man kills her for her own good. The second man feels sad about it later).

Before anybody gets it into their head to tell me that this is loosely adapting the Dark Phoenix Saga and that that somehow makes everything okay: don’t do that. I know it’s an adaptation. There is nothing important you can tell me about Jean Grey and the Phoenix that I don’t already know. Don’t be that guy. But beyond that, Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men is not sacred nor is any other aspect of their storied history. I will happily critique ALL OF IT.

Now back to the movie.

The X-Men

X-Men: The Last Stand leaves the titular team looking a little anemic. The other original X-Men (Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, and Professor X) also receive truly awful treatment in this film. The unofficial sixth, Rogue, doesn’t fare much better.

Cyclops (James Marsden) serves as the first, and arguably greatest, casualty of this film. Cyclops never really got his due. Here, he appears for only the first act and only as a mopey mess, before being killed off-screen.

Similarly, Rogue (Anna Paquin) rarely received adequate character focus in the past two films. She made up little more than a plot device in the first film. Her arc represented an afterthought in the second. Her only presence in this film involves her decision to take the mutant cure. The film fails to explore the decision to do so in enough detail to make it worthwhile as social commentary on the desire many marginalized groups have to pass. This narrative decision also means that Rogue misses everything of meaning in the third act. If I didn’t mention it yet, all of this happens due to angst over a boy.

Xavier has a dramatic final scene, and that’s about it. He’s a non-entity in the film, other than his death and the scene where he reveals he manipulated Jean’s mind without her consent when she was a child.

Storm (Halle Berry) finally gets a chance to step up. It’s purely due to organizational attrition, even though she’s pretty consistently the only character with her head on straight. Unfortunately, the film lacks interest in exploring her as a real character. Even though, by literally any metric, she should be more impacted by the X-Men’s losses than anybody, the film focuses primarily on Wolverine’s emotional turmoil.

And so we’re back to the Wolverine. Logan has not had a worse showing than this film. Even his first solo film had some redeeming qualities. It’s hard to even describe this version of Logan, as he’s become very bland and reactionary.

The New Mutants

The newer additions to the team don’t do much better. Alan Cumming doesn’t return as Nightcrawler at all, though we do get Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman and Daniel Cudmore’s Colossus back for this film. Cudmore in particular gets a lot more focus this time around, being upgraded to full X-Man status from his previous cameo as babysitter. They’re joined by Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde. I like Page in the role, but as one of the biggest Kitty Pryde stans you’re ever likely to meet I was disappointed at the relative shortness of her involvement.

This film also introduces a major new face to the team. Kelsey Grammer as Beast may be one of the greatest pieces of superhero casting of all time. He possesses all the wit, charm, and intelligence of his comic counterpart. The makeup/prosthetics they use for the design are also top-notch. Honestly, he looks better than the Nicholas Hoult version that came years later.

The New Brotherhood

Magneto and friends fare just as poorly as their heroic counterparts.

They ruin Magneto’s character in this film. Magneto lacks a normal moral compass, but he always had some principles. He also appeared to be an intelligent man. In this film he does things that seem to be completely at odds with his code AND common sense. Abandoning his de-powered chief lieutenant seems like a bad move from a purely tactical standpoint. And his unwavering decision to default to child murder in the finale rings equally hollow. I can buy that he might work his way up to that decision if he thought it was necessary. But the film does not earn that moment. Personally, I think it was an intentional choice to paint him as cartoonishly evil so the audience wouldn’t empathize with his army over the US government.

Pyro has returned from X2. I’m not sure what else I could say about him other than “He’s back.”

Mystique appears in the film for a bit, but then she gets her powers taken away and disappears.

The new kids are equally forgettable. A whole bunch of interesting members of the X-franchise get their cinematic debut wasted on sloppily underwritten non-entities. I’m so ambivalent on them I’m not going to waste the effort to look them up.

Production Quality of X-Men: The Last Stand

The truth is that the non-narrative part of this film range from competent to legitimately good. The score is okay, the stunts are respectable, and the visual effects are actually quite good. The only criticism in any of those areas that I have is that the de-aging tech they used for Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen was very primitive compared to the uses we’ve seen in more recent films. I know I’ve made fun of the way this tech was implemented in films like Civil War, but Last Stand is a stark reminder of how far visual effects work has come.

These elements are decidedly NOT sufficient to salvage this dumpster fire.

Conclusion

This film demonstrates actual competency in several key areas, setting it apart from X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

But another thing that sets X-Men: The Last Stand apart is that I don’t actively hate Wolverine’s first solo outing.

Yeah, this is the new bottom of the rankings.

PS- If you read this piece and you liked what you saw, consider donating to my Patreon! Donations from readers like you make this site possible.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

Reddit

Tumblr

Pinterest

LinkedIn

