The Not-Yet Last Stand

I made it through X-Men: The Last Stand. It was supposed to be the last X-Men movie, the trilogy. X-Men, for me is the greatest superheroes’ movie ever, apart from The Incredibles – which was the greatest animated experience ever. (Thanks-rant: I thank Brad Bird. I thank Steve Jobs for buying out Pixar from George Lucas. I thank Javed Jaffery for an excellent dub making it the best-ever Hindi dubbed movie.)

But back to The Last Stand.

I am calling it The Last Stand, just like everyone at JoBlo’s does. Why? Because this is not an X-Men movie. Not for me. Not for the many movie and comic geeks out there. Hollywood is filled with movie makers who make the movies as in produce. They are part of a bigger creature called THE STUDIO. Now, a studio has the power to make or break a movie. It can bet huge and come out with a surprise – New Line Cinema’s greatest gamble called THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It can bet small and come out with a success - CRASH. It can also bet HUGE and fall head-first – TROY (In this case heel-first). All these amounts to a single most important part of movie business – creativity. Creativity in Hollywood is second only to probability of success. When quick-buck stands against a possible-bucks-in-future, the former wins hands down.

FOX could have waited for Bryan Singer. Apparently Singer was busy in the greatest re-incarnation in Cinema History. But they were looking for some quick bucks. When they got Matthew Vaughn on board for X-Men 3 I was all ready to forgive their urgency in pushing the movie. I love Vaughn. He just directed one movie and I love it. It’s called LAYER CAKE, See it. But as luck should have it Vaughn moved out. Instead of waiting for Singer or Vaughn, FOX goes ahead and assigns BRETT RATNER. I only saw Ratner’s Rush Hour and I can say without any reproach that it was very bad. More so, because a mumbling Black actor and an accented-asian actor hitting out on some gang isn’t my type of movie. I saw part of AFTER THE SUNSET. It didn’t interest me much even though anything with Salma Hayek would.

I am indignant. The Last Stand depends more on the mutants’ powers rather than the character itself. Most footage was wasted on CGI sequences and more on the various entries of characters – Wolverine jumping from the jet and using his claws to make an easy landing (Crap!). Storm changing weather because she was sad (Crap!), didn’t she felt bad/sad/angry in the last two movies. The movie was like, “Alright we don’t have much to tell, so we’ll put in whatever mutants we can think of”. But it wouldn’t have been that. The story was awesome. In the hands of Singer or even Vaughn the plot would have culminated to the greatest X-Men movie ever. I didn’t want to see half-assed mutants. I never want to see Storm acting up like a main character. I hate Storm. She would have been great if she died or just disappeared or whatever. I just can’t stop raving about how BAD this movie is. Not a shred of reason. No story telling at all. I don’t know how some great online reviewers found this movie good. My man, Joblo gave this sucker 5/10, which is bad but not bad enough. I can’t think of a number higher than 3.

The best part of The Last Stand was that it was very short. Clocking a little over 90 minutes, I was happy for the movie to end. The end was a bit like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and woman). (Sidenote: I saw LXG in the theaters, first day. Crappier than X3, I was laughing even before the intermission.) With an Indian POV I can say this movie is gonna make money that it didn’t make back in the west, LXG did. We are going to have various language versions – Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and all. And everyone will rush to see YEX-MEN in their preferred language. I can’t believe VAN HELSING (in Telugu) is still running in some theaters here. The current craze is Underworld 2 (again, in Telugu). They even change the titles of the movies sometimes. Right now, Superman Returns’ Spots are coming on the TV and the Hindi version has conveniently bumped off Returns - It’s now just Superman. But whatever the name Superman is going to Rock and I’ll be there to witness the amalgamation of an iconic hero and the best Superhero director there is, Bryan Singer.