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Fantastic Four: C+ »

I'm not sure I believe the movie studios when they say that this is the final x-men film but there is definitely a deck-clearing finality to the events here that really work in it's favor. When you start to see main characters getting knocked off it gives the story a sense of real consequence that you wouldn't expect from a summer superhero flick. We all know the next X-men movie is going to be a Wolverine spin-off which makes a lot of sense but it seems they might be moving towards a new set of x-men films that would only have the younger characters (read: less expensive actors) which might be a tough sell for most people. One of the problems with this movie is the over-populated cast, which is also a problem in the comic books. Too many characters get short-shrifted here so moving the Wolverine focus to another film entirely might help that problem the next time around. But will anyone want to see an X-men movie without Wolverine (or some of the other bigger names for that matter)?

It's hard not to think how much better this movie might have been if Bryan Singer stayed on as director. Instead we get Brett Ratner who does a decent job keeping the look and feel consitent with the series but he never blows you away with either the story or the action the way Singer did with X2. The biggest problem this movie has is that it tries to do too much. We get the Cure storyline and the Dark Phoenix story in one movie which doesn't do either plot any favors. The Jean Grey/Pheonix story is especially a disappointment because they do such a great job in adapting the most famous X-men story of all time, excising the galactic aspect of it and replacing it with a more interesting schizonphrenia angle, but they never really give it enough time to develop or explain. This really should have had it's own movie.

This was still really fun though. Ian McKellan is great as usual. Halle Berry is given more to do and is much less embarrassing than in the last two movies. I liked Kitty Pryde a lot and some of the new mutants they introduce were used very well. And like I said before, they wipe out a surprising number of characters here which made it more involving than it might have been otherwise. But they've also set it up so they can go in a number of directions from here and that's good too.

Posted at June 4, 2006 08:45 AM