Note to Action Film Makers: Scripts are Still Important

X-Men: The Last Stand (3/5 stars)

First of all, I'll say that I didn't care for the first X-Men very much at all, but I actually liked the second quite a bit. I was hoping that this one would be as good as the second, and it had the potential, but it just didn't live up to it at all.

I blame the vast majority of the problems of the movie on really bad screenwriting. Less is more. There are too many characters who serve virtually no purpose, too many sideplots that distract from the main story and don't really go anywhere, and too many attempts to blow away the audience with action scenes rather than spending time on character development.

What made one comic book movie, Batman Begins, excellent was that the story was actually very compelling and the characters were well defined, their motivations made sense. It didn't have to rely completely on a massive special effects sequence ending and a gigantic battle to woo the audience, which is what this movie attempted to do. Or, in the second X-Men, we actually learned about the characters; their backstories, what makes them who they are, why they do what they do. This movie just goes for shock value; rather than spending time on people, instead we just get a lot of deaths or injuries to major characters and a massively jumbled ending battle sequence where I couldn't even count how many people were dying.

Finally, the main two story arcs were not developed well enough, most likely because too much time was spent on bland and boring subplots and the action sequences I've described already. One, where there is a "cure" developed for being a mutant in order to remove their powers. Another, the introduction of an all-powerful mutant who cannot be stopped by anything. Both of these could have been used very well but are kind of just dangled at the audience to create a slight bit of intrigue, and then thrown away at the end without coming to much of if any conclusion.

I wouldn't say it isn't an enjoyable movie to watch, but I was just disappointed. Having seen the second and knowing how much better it is, I expected a lot more than I got.