X3 Review

Overall rating: 2.5 out of 5

Spoiler Warning.

X-3 was a major disappointment to me. When I walked into the theater to see the first X-Men movie, I was expecting just another cheesy superhero flick. The opening scene in German-occupied Poland during WWII destroyed that expectation. It was powerful, emotional, and moving. It set a tone, that as much as this movie was going to be about superhero's, it would also be about people. The second sequence, where Marie nearly kills her boyfriend with a kiss confirmed that feeling. From then on, the film focused on telling the story of some people that have discovered that they are different in fairly serious way from everyone else. It focused on the distrust between normal people and mutants, yet it confirmed the humanity of both. The parallels to racism and homosexual haters was everpresent, but not overstated. Still, the primary conflict of the first film was not mutants vs. people, but mutants vs. other mutants that wanted to launch a pre-emptive strike against the normal people.

The second film continued the tradition of the first. Again, the film was about people. It introduced a couple of new mutants, but showed marvelous restraint in that regard. The new mutants were given the same care and attention to storytelling as were the original cast, and the story of the original cast was extended somewhat. There was more action in the second film, but it also had a lot of story from the first film propping it up.

The first two films were done by Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects (one of the most tightly crafted movies I've ever seen), and producer of House. Singer did not do the third film because he was busy working on Superman Returns. Were I FOX, I would have waited.

The 3rd movie is all-over-the-place. Rumor has it that the script was being re-written daily--and it shows. It's like they couldn't decide what story to tell, but it also looks like that knew exactly what action sequences they were going to shoot. I use the term "story" loosely--there are actually two separate, independent story arcs that were slammed together, but not integrated.

The first story concerns the development of a cure for the Mutant X gene. Of the two, this is the most interesting. A pharmaceutical company has developed a cure and made it available to anyone that wants it. It raises an interesting question: who wants it? If you had the chance to change something fundamental about yourself, would you do it?

The war-mongering mutants see this as a dire threat and warn that the cure will be used as a weapon--which it is--against the attacks of the war-mongering mutants. Magneto's bunch see's any mutant that takes the cure as a "traitor to their kind." This is interesting because now Magneto has become the racist bastard that he's always accusing everyone else of being. The other mutants see it as a matter of personal choice. This is all good fodder for storytelling, so what went wrong?

The story wasn't told. It was used merely as an excuse to get to the next action sequence.

This movie was overloaded with mutants. Whereas Bryan Singer had taken care to introduce new mutants with the attendant screen-time to make them real and human, Brett Ratner just threw them at you right and left. Angel was a couple of minutes of the movie, and as much as I enjoyed Kelsey Grammar's performance as Beast, like Angel, it was wasted screen time. In fact, the Beast story had real potential.

We're given the sense that this movie takes place some time after the first two. There is an a Ministry of Mutant Affairs in the government, headed by a Mutant--Beast. Beast later leaves his post in the presidential cabinent over conscientious objections to the cure being used as a weapon. This could have been really exciting, dramatic storytelling. Instead, it was mentioned as an afterthought, after it had happened.

Even the opening scene displayed what was wrong with the movie. In the first film, we open on Poland. In the second one, we open on an attack on the President by a mutant in the White House. In each of the first two movies, the opening scene was relevant to the plot of the movie. The Poland experience explains why Magneto wants to launch a pre-emptive strike against humans. The attack on the President leads to Presidential authorization of the search at Xavier's school which ---you get the idea. The opening scene in X-3 considered qua action sequence was quite good--but it was unrelated to anything that happened later in the movie.

My final gripe is that all the mutants are now over-powered. I don't remember Storm being able to jump 5 stories in the first two films, or Wolverine for that matter. No attention was paid to making sure that the characters were the same as in the first two films.

I did like the movie--in the same way that I might watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick--as a mindless action story where story is an excuse to watch things blow up. That has its place, but after X1 and X2, I expected more from X3.