Day: June 16, 2006

How the heck can I review this movie without spoiling some of it? Being an X-Men fan of old (someday I’ll get back into comics…like when I retire!), this franchise is near and dear to my heart.

Unfortunately, to go along with my spoiler free policy on Palmer’s World, I suppose I can’t get into too much detail here, so I’ll throw a pro/con list out here.

Pros

• Beast was AWESOME!!! So cool. Way cooler than Nightcrawler. Well, I suppose this is true if you actually like the Beast better than Nightcrawler.
• Decent ending (? if it is?) to the whole mutant vs. human storyline. The 3 movies revolve around it – I can see the next movie just focussing more on one villain (ala James Bond).
• Storm – Hey! She got to speak in this movie!
• Excellent clip after the credits which follows the comics (from what I can remember of them) and opens up the new storyline I think.
• Good action?

Cons

• Well, if you’re fan of the comic books, then this movie may irk you a little because it goes against comic lore in a few ways. But if you don’t read the books, then you will probably find it enjoyable (as many friends have).
• Angel – Come on. Did he even speak in the movie? Way too little screen time. Should have been cut out of the movie.
• More characters like Angel – A slew of characters introduced for little or no reason.
• Juggernaut – Ugh. I don’t know…I don’t know. In some ways it was cool to see him, in others, he was kinda silly.
• Deaths – Am I spoiling the movie if I say someone dies? So be it. Someone dies. Kind of unnecessary.

Yeah, so…all in all, definitely not as good as the other two X-Men…but not the worst movie ever. Benoit thought it was so horrible that he put it in league with The Incredible Hulk. Good lord, that movie was awful…but X-Men 3 was nowhere near as bad. I equate X-Men with the equivalent of a bad comic book in the series – you still love the X-Men and what they do, but the comic just wasn’t the greatest (but you still like it anyhow). It’s like with anything you like – take a TV show for example. There’s good ones and bad ones.

Oh! Let’s take James Bond and the whole Roger Moore era for example. Boom. Point proven. A low point in the James Bond history. Not as low as Timothy Dalton though. I liked him better as an actor compared to Roger Moore, but I didn’t care for the rogue agent story they were going for in…License to Kill? Or was it The Living Daylights?

If you don’t read the comics, you’ll like the movie. If you read the comics, you will be disappointed, but hopefully not TOO disappointed. I would say that if the movie had another 30 minutes added to it, it would have been great. I found they cut down a lot of stuff that would have been better if they added 5 minutes to each major sequence (like a fight vs. Pyro and Iceman…give it 5 more minutes and it would have been mint.)

I invite whoever wants to chat it up with me about specific points in the movie to do so (I know Benoit has been waiting 2 weeks to talk about how it was the worst movie ever. I’m not sure how I want to oppose his points. It wasn’t the Hulk, but it sure wasn’t Spider-Man)