X-Men: The Last Stand

We've been trying to get to see this for ages but given the recent good weather, it's been difficult to justify sitting in a warm and stuffy movie hall and not lying in the sun. Still we got there in the end…

Humans and mutants are getting along a little better, there's even a Department of Mutant Affairs headed up by Dr. Hank McCoy, better known as Beast (Kelsey Grammer). But things start to go bad again when a pharmaceutical company claims it's found a cure for the mutant gene. This may be a spark of hope for some mutants but for the majority it only brings terror.

Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his Brotherhood see this as the perfect chance to raise an army of mutants and to launch a war against a humanity who would force their "cure" on them. On top of all this, Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) returns from the dead but she's most certainly not the same person that Professor Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) school for gifted children knew.

At the end of X2, it was assumed that Dr. Jane Grey had perished in the flood at Alkali Lake but there was a hint right at the end of the film that she or something had survived under the lake surface. Now we find out that she's actually a class five mutant, the strongest ever recorded, and was being mentally held in check by Prof. Xavier as she couldn't control her awsome powers once activated. This isn't really a spoiler as you'll find all this out fairly quickly but it does seem an unlikely plot given the first two installments.

There's a bit of character stability as the main cast from the previous two movies re-appear. Apart from those already mentioned, we get Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Ororo Munroe/Storm (Halle Berry), Marie/Rogue (Anna Paquin), Raven Darkholme/Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), Scott Summers/Cyclops (James Marsden), Bobby Drake/Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), John Allerdyce/Pyro (Aaron Stanford) and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page). New faces this time round are Dr. Hank McCoy/Beast (Kelsey Grammer), Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), Callisto (Dania Ramirez), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Multiple Man (Eric Dane), Jubilee (Kea Wong) and Angel (Ben Foster). All of those are quite a lot to take in but it helps keep the action going and there's plenty of it.

I quite enjoyed this but it seems a bit lacking when compared to the two earlier movies. With so many characters, some of them seem little used and some of the scenes looked a bit rushed. Still the special effects are the best yet and there's no shortage of them. Best performance points go to Sir Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman.

Billed as the final episode in the trilogy, which is true as it's the third one, but I don't think the story is over yet…

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Science-Fiction.
My Rating: 7/10