FINAL X-TINCTIONS: LAST STAND(no.15)
two steps forward, X steps back...
grab your silly red glasses and bust out that fur suit for Rent’s Due: Final X-tinctions, a retrospective on the various endings of what’s oddly the second-most consistent long-running superhero franchise of all-time,1 in anticipation of this week’s Deadpool and Wolverine. no more preamble here bc i wanna get the taste of shit out of my mouth already with this one.
spoilers for X-Men: The Last Stand and Days of Future Past if that bothers you.
i had not seen X-Men 3 since i watched it for the first time at seven years old, and like almost dying from on a piece of pepperoni lodged in my throat at the local Chuck E’ Cheese, its memory has never fully withered away.
it’s not even in a “we had it good then” kind of way, cause the film’s still a weak mess overall,2 but more in the sense of how you’d feel if you killed a vampire incorrectly; this annoyance you get from this semi-soulless thing that for some reason didn’t die off completely. it’s not the best kind of metaphor, but i’m committing to that bit.
X3, despite its commercial success, is practically responsible for crutching the franchise in ways that kept it from growing beyond what made it familiar. it’s a film that, by some form of alchemy, takes some interesting steps forward for the franchise’s future (Cyclops’ death) while also being sheepishly held back (how does Magneto get stabbed with a handful of mutant-curing syringes and can still wiggle a chess piece?), resulting in a story that just exists.3
a little better than not doing nothing, but somehow worse than doing nothing at all.
i guess i can dive into what i liked about this movie before heading back to the its egregious negatives.
- first of all, you will not win against me arguing that there’s no chemistry within the team. with the exception of Origins: Wolverine and parts of New Mutants, these movies have kind of mastered the art of conveying a found family dynamic that truly care about one another. i’m sure a lot of that can be credited to the performances (Hugh Jackman: literally born for this), but to me, the camaraderie of the X-Men in these movies feels so natural that it makes a lot of whatever dynamics still work well in the MCU today look emotionally stunted by comparison.4
for a weird-ass example: i think Storm (Halle Berry) isn’t really good in these movies, but i would never want Halle Berry’s Storm to die. i don’t care about the character that much, but i’d be lying if i said i didn’t care for how Logan would feel if something would happen to her. bc these two are teammates who, with their little quips and quick looks at each other, make me want to root for them even in the most surface-level way.
i call it the “this one’s for you, Morph” paradox, and i will not be dissuaded on this.
- yeah, it really is hilarious that Kelsey Grammer only had his one big turn as Beast in this movie. he brings this well-needed warmth and levity to the film despite looking like Furry Frasier (imo it just adds more to the charm, regardless of my hate for furries). the scene where he visits Leech5 got me in a way that i could only appreciate now as an adult, growing up with these character for over twenty years.
Grammer with just those moments alone perfectly encapsulated the inner conflict that resides in the best stories involving the character, with only a matter of seconds.
looking back, Beast was a rare case of good type-casting with someone who desperately wanted to be type-casted, considering the love Grammer held for the character dating back to way before the first movie, and it pays off for the precious moments we get to spend with him doing shit like flipping all over the place and chumming off with Wolverine and that silly-ass puffjob on his hair.
to conclude this glazing, the man put his whole dick and balls into that performance, and after this revisit, he’s the only reason why i would ever want to see X3 again.
now, as we return to the shit portion of this Bizarro-compliment sandwich, i have to stress what might be painfully obvious to you, my hot asf Reader: i understand that other life shit can get in the way of making things work.
- yes, Rebecca Romijn (Mystique) and James Marsden (Cyclops) had scheduling conflicts during production (probably Anna Paquin too, but probably not for True Blood yet cause this was 2005) whilst Bryan Singer and Marsden left to make Superman Returns.
yes, i know now upon researching that Matthew Vaughn was supposed to direct this while it was still a somewhat-more-faithful adaptation of Dark Phoenix Saga with Sigourney Weaver as Emma Frost and Keanu Reeves as Gambit.
i know that weird internet shit that could only happen in the 2000s somehow caused a rush from Fox to rewrite most of the film in order to make its Memorial Day release date, leading to Vaughn dropping out of the film due to private life issues eventually getting replaced by Brett Ratner at the last second.
all of these things can be true and all of them can explain why this movie creatively flopped, but that doesn’t excuse the final result to largely discard the purposeful pieces in this franchise with choices that feel inherently disrespectful to the world we’ve been following for 25 fucking years.
(i’m gonna go into entitled fanboy mode for a quick second)
- Cyclops in the original trilogy lived and died getting beat by the Loser Dickhead allegations, and for him to be killed off so quickly, with nobody really caring that he might actually be dead until maybe 90 minutes in, felt like salt in the wound to a character who could’ve been so much more.
we know how well-written he could be in things like ‘97, but it’s hard to imagine Ratner and co. really giving a shit when the only things of importance that Scott has to do is act distant, leave his family behind and become Phoenix canon-fodder.
granted, this was obviously director-for-hire work, but just because it’s that doesn’t mean that you have to throw away the pathos that comes with the material.6
hell, despite how pissed i sound about killing off Scott, i think it’s what the movie does with Rogue that upsets me more.
- i get that Astonishing X-Men was the new hotness and the Gifted storyline makes for an interesting ethical subplot on the surface, but to have Rogue, a character who (like Logan) accepts the reality that they can never be normal, reject her own identity for a chance at holding hands with Bobby (Shawn Ashmore) is pure weak shit.
it’s a warped-ass message for anyone watching the film. tf do you mean we shouldn’t embrace who we are, that we should reject our flaws the moment an opportunity rises to erase what makes us us? i could understand that sentiment if it was a scared nobody character who we’ve never met before, but for it to be the second anchor point of the first movie? it’s just plain sad.
in some ways, the X-Men movies never seemed to recover after the creative missteps of Last Stand. after this, they resorted in going back to the past in an effort to make a new Cyclops that went go nowhere (like 98% of what happened in Origins: Wolverine), before bouncing back in quality when Vaughn returned to make his X-Men proper with the stellar First Class. and yet, even in something as good as that and Days of Future Past, and in all the time-fuckery that occurred in between, there was still this prevailing cloud that shadowed the franchise by these movies not going forward in time and directly dealing with the shit left in X3’s wake. something that wouldn’t be corrected until 2013’s The Wolverine, where it made steps towards that recovery.
and until a year after that, when what’s practically the precursor to Avengers: Endgame decided to nip the shit in the bud for (what was at the time) good.
Next: X-Men: Days of Future Past
if you don’t count the MCU as, idk, the Iron Man saga or something. in terms of more hits than misses, it’s Batman followed by X-Men followed by Spider-Man.
the first pitch in the triple blue-balled whammy that was this, Superman Returns and Spider-Man 3. doesn’t matter how many shitposts you can make out of it, nostalgia can be a sad fucking drug.
in a way that Days of Future Past takes very seriously by completely retconning the events of this movie lol.
with the exception of Guardians of the Galaxy. grain of salt here: i am also, a huge X-Men shill if you haven’t noticed.
another footnote: fucking LEECH was in this movie the whole time?! even Multiple-Man and Jubilee as well, though they’re all basically superfluous despite how important they make Leech out to be.
i’ll also get this out of the way now because there’s no logical space to put it above: i feel bad for Famke Janssen, Colossus and Angel (cool intro scene aside) are just there, Juggernaut’s fine for what little he does here, and Kitty’s just okay. i think Elliot Page did a much better job at capturing the character’s attitude with the brief moments she has during DOFP.
Brett Ratner: somehow the lesser of two evils compared to Bryan Singer, but that’s like saying getting curb-stomped by an orangutan is a little better than putting your balls in a microwave.
As someone who watched like 4 of the X men movies at random points in my childhood to early adolescence, I enjoyed this read. 👍 you rock.