1. X-Men- The Last Stand
This is possibly the white whale of movie-going geeks everywhere, an incredibly disappointing realisation that sometimes, Hollywood just plain hates you. Never before has a film promised so much yet delivered so little. The only way I can hope to convey this colossal disappointment is this; imagine if
The Dark Knight Rises had turned out to be awful. Not just disappointing, but actually truly awful. That was literally the magnitude of scale by which
The Last Stand was judged. Much like its superhero successor, the X-Men series followed a distinct trajectory. The first film was mostly set-up, spending a large portion of the run-time introducing the eponymous institution on which the film was based. However, it nonetheless featured an excellent plot, well-rounded characters and a good finale. In the same vein as
TheDark Knight,
X-Men 2 represented a series high-point; a now more-confident director (Bryan Singer) was given licence to take risks with the characters we had become familiar with, and spectacular results followed. Scenes such as the White House introduction to Nightcrawler and Logan going medieval on the mansions invaders are quite rightly etched onto the consciousness of comic-book fans everywhere, but it is the ending cliff-hanger that can possibly be named the greatest moment of an already great film. Through a fantastic set-piece, Singer effectively confirmed that the third X-Men film would follow a similar route to the critically lauded Dark Phoenix plotline. But unlike
TDKR,
X-Men: The Last Stand couldnt live up to the hype. Instead, it descended into a befuddled mess, fumbling a treasure trove of great ideas and leaving us with nothing but scraps. Damn, did this film suck. Ever since Bryan Singer left the X-Men project for the equally disappointing
Superman Returns we all had our doubts. When he was replaced by Brett Ratner, we were all actively wincing. And he didnt disappoint. Some of the decisions were just plain strange; whilst we all knew that some mutants possessed terrible powers, the introduction of a class system and an exposition character to explain it often made the narrative extremely clunky. Though depowering fan-favourite Mystique was a bad move, replacing her with Vinnie Jones went beyond the bad and into the baffling, and where once Ian McKellen was a brooding, mesmeric Magneto he was now just hamming it up, not helped by silly dialogue (that building bridges line sticks out). Furthermore, killing off Cyclops in the first reel and Professor X by the halfway point didnt feel like a decent twist, more like a horrific kick in the crotch. It was almost childlike in its execution, with arbitrary moves being committed whilst the director screamed LOOK! PLOT DEVELOPMENT! It mightve been plot, Brett, but not as we knew it. I think that what happened was this; Ratner clearly just wasnt a skilled enough film-maker to discern the overarching commentary on social issues such as segregation from their admittedly pulpy origins. Instead, he chose to make a crash-bang-wallop affair, having misunderstood the comic as only a comic; kiddie fare full of ADHD action sequences and nothing else. This patently wasnt what
X-Men was about, and so a massive tonal fumble was spawned. After all, when not even a blued-up Kelsey Grammar can save a film, you know somethings gone very wrong indeed. Agree or disagree? Any other choices? Feel free to comment below.