Being the weekend of Fleet Week, the sidewalks surrounding Times Square tonight were dotted with sailors in crisp white uniforms and a larger-than-usual number of prostitutes. But I was there to see X-Men: The Last Stand at the AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street with Jimi and Company.
It’s another throwaway big-budget actionriffic extravaganza, but the earlier battle scenes don’t match the intensity of the final confrontation pitting bad mutants vs. good mutants + humans. I won’t give anything away but it’s got a lot of pithy maneuvers and lines of dialogue that made many members of the audience lunge forward in their seats and shout out in glee, drowning out entire lines of the dialogue that followed.
There many key mutant deaths in this film, which makes it the grimmest of the three films now in the franchise. It also has the weightiest message, with a plot of a “cure” for “mutant behavior” apparently alluding to “homosexuality.” Finally, this installment contains the most non-celebrity mutants nobody cares about, all of whom seemed to be dressed as extras for a Michael Jackson video and none of whom taxed either the scriptwriters’ imagination nor the film’s special effects budget.
I wish I would have not read those reviews that revealed a bunch of the fun bits. More of the usual superhero shenanigans from the gang, including Halle Berry, who must have threatened to beat the producers with her Oscar until they agreed to give her more screen time. She still can’t act.
If you see the film, make sure you sit all the way through the credits. There’s a brief scene planted at the very end that plays off on a throwaway detail from earlier in the film. It caused the few nerds left in the theater to nearly wet themselves with glee.