X-Men: The Last Stand Review

Bryan Singer left for Superman Returns, Matthew Vaughn walked weeks before production, and Brett Ratner inherited a film with a locked release date and no time to think about it. What arrives is fast and hollow. The cure story and the Phoenix story are both good ideas and neither gets room: Jean Grey spends most of her resurrection standing still and glowering, and Famke Janssen is handed barely forty lines to carry the arc two previous films had been building.

Killing Cyclops offscreen in the first ten minutes and Xavier before the midpoint reads less like nerve than like housekeeping. Kelsey Grammer is the one real success, giving Beast the weariness of an old diplomat who has watched this argument before. Vinnie Jones is present to say a single line lifted from a cartoon. The Golden Gate Bridge sequence is a genuine piece of spectacle and also the moment the logic quits, since Magneto could have walked the bridge to Alcatraz rather than carrying it across the bay in one piece. At a hundred and four minutes this is the shortest film in the series and by some distance the most harried, cutting away to subplots it has already given up on.