Slowly Learning...

I was looking forward to this for a long time. I was never a gigantic comic book fan, but I always had an interest in X-men, and I loved the first two films. So I went into this with such high hopes, too high.

As the trailers rolled I was even more excited. The first trailer? SNAKES ON A PLANE! Hell yes! Then...all downhill. I would say that the rest of this will contain spoilers, but it's hard to spoil something that already sucks.

Have you watched the trailer on TV? Then you've seen about all you will see of Cyclops (not a big loss, he's a tool anyway), Mystique, and Prof. X (how can you kill Jean Luc?). How do they compensate for basically killing off three of the most popular x-men characters? Well they throw in a bunch of random mutants that no one has heard of that range from overdone (she's quick as the Flash and can sense the level of other mutants? what?) to downright stupid (that spiky-faced dude in the trailers? He's one of the main villians! Yeah, and that's the extent of his power). True they also added Juggernaut (nicely done) and expanded Kitty's role more (gotta have that teen drama!), and Beast was well done (you go Kelsey Grammer!), but overall it's a bad choice.

And then there's the story... Again, so much promise; again, so much failure. There really were too many stories thrown into one, and none of them were really explored far enough. We have Jean losing control, Wolverine in love with Jean, Iceman vs. Pyro (god that one sucked), Iceman-Kitty-Rogue Triangle, mutant cure, etc. And all of it was done with way too much over the top action and special effects and too little actual story and plot.

And then there were the little things too. At the end there is a "gigantic" battle between Magneto's "army" (i.e. about 50 mutants? Wow) and the remaining X-men (Storm, Wolverine, Iceman, Beast, Colossus, and Kitty). And for a clash of powers battle, it was lame. The lamest part? Jean going nuts and Wolverine talking her back down long enough for him to save/kill her. But the worst part? Well there were a couple.

1 - Magneto and his army take the Golden Gate Bridge and move it to Alcatraz to kill off the mutant cure. They do all this while it's still sunny out, but when they start the attack it's the middle of the night. Umm, how? Did it really take Magneto 8 hours to move the bridge?

2 - Magneto tosses cars at the X-men while Pyro lights them on fire (why? eh, who knows). They manage to throw about a dozen or so, however, when they cut back to the bridge it is still completely full of cars. Minor detail, but come on. It's the little things that count.

3 - If the mutant power of a mutant is to cure all mutants that come within 3 feet of him, wouldn't he cure himself and thus negate his own power? Just a thought. But I can overlook that one. But why does he have to be a pale bald child who looks like a cancer patient in a completely white sterile looking room? That just seems a bit extreme. But nice product placement of the 360 in his room.

In the end there were just so many things wrong about this movie that I completely lost interest about 20 minutes in. And I really wanted to like this movie and had heard relatively good things about it, so I was going in with a totally positive attitude. It's almost impressive that Brett Ratner managed to turn me so fast. You want to know how bad it got? At one point I actually considered walking out and checking out what was happening down the hall in MI3. Yes you read that right. I almost left X-men to watch Cruise. How!?! How can this happen? How can you fail so badly? Brett Ratner, shame on you.

RATING: Go find the copies of this film and burn them. Then make sure Ratner doesn't direct ever again. (Oh and avoid actually paying for or watching the film itself)