10 Glorious Deaths In Forgettable Films
3. Cyclops' Last Stand (X-Men: The Last Stand)
Poor James Marsden.
He never really stood a chance in Fox's first rendition of Xavier's Team of Gifted Youngsters. Being saddled with the lazy trope of jealous/over-protective boyfriend, Cyclops found himself playing second fiddle to Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in the entirety of the original X-Men trilogy.
The third outing acts as the series' forsaken low point as a combination of muddled storylines and a clusterf*ck of characters all vying for screen-time, meant that the Dark Phoenix storyline, that we all so desperately had been pleading for, fell flat on its face.
Not all was lost.
In the thick of the mucky plot, Brett Ratner found time to actually give us one of the few conclusively devastating moments of the expansive X-Men Universe. After losing his girlfriend (Jean Grey, played by the acutely cast Famke Janssen), Cyclops returns to the scene of her death at Alkali Lake and, to his utter amazement, finds her alive and well. Kissing, in an intimate show of longing, Scott Summers soon realises that this woman isn't the one her lost and he is disembowelled by the Dark Phoenix Grey has become.
When witnessed for the first time, this moment is absolutely shattering. It's just a shame that the rest of the film didn't live up to the billing or it would be held in as similar regard as the rest of the original trilogy.
Sadly, it's an outing that even Fox decided to strike from the record in Days of Future Past.