Cinemutants - X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2006, it’s X-Men: The Last Stand. The mutant world faces its greatest threat when a cure for mutation is developed. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) have their hands – and claws – full when Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) returns from the dead and allies herself with Magneto (Ian McKellen), who is leading the mutant resistance against the cure.

1. An age of darkness. It’s generally been agreed that The Last Stand is where the X-Men franchise begins to drop the ball, and in some ways you might say it never fully recovers. At least three of the subsequent films reckon with the legacy of this one, with a snide joke in Apocalypse acknowledging that third films in trilogies don’t always work. After nearly twenty years, this one is strikingly grim, killing off [SPOILERS!] both Cyclops and Professor X before spinning its wheels until a third act that looks staggeringly like a television soundstage. Meanwhile, amid a host of dark plotlines, the film is littered with jokes of an astonishingly dated sensibility, giving one the distinct impression that The Last Stand is a cartoon brought to life by an edgy teenager.
2. Dark Phoenix rising. Last week I called the Dark Phoenix Saga “the franchise’s Everest summit,” and The Last Stand is a spectacular failure of an adaptation. Where the comics were a sober meditation on absolute power and the ethics of mutantkind’s response to genocide, this film recasts the Phoenix as Jean Grey’s uncontrollable power… only for her to stand around not doing very much with that power. It’s a classic “show, don’t tell” failure, compounded by the confusing decision to subordinate her abilities to Magneto’s will. We’ll see the franchise take one more swing at Dark Phoenix in the film of the same name, which finds entirely new ways to drop the ball, while Jean’s ultimate fate will haunt Hugh Jackman’s Logan for much of the rest of his tenure.
3. Pyro mania. I was pretty surprised that the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer announced that Aaron Stanford would be returning as Pyro, but that’s because I’d forgotten how the Pyro/Iceman rivalry became weirdly central to this trilogy. After Pyro threw his lot in with Magneto in X2, The Last Stand spends a not-insignificant amount of time teasing his inevitable showdown with Iceman, whose pure ice form is reserved for the pinnacle moment of their big fight sequence. The movie even clears Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) from the deck to make room for Pyro. While I’m sure that there will be no shortage of recognizable faces in the new Deadpool trailer, using Pyro feels like leaning into the idiosyncrasies of dead continuity – which, to be fair, is on brand for Deadpool.
4. Too much of a good thing. At an hour and forty-four minutes (the exact length of X-Men, mind you), The Last Stand has way too much going on for a coherent story. Its three antagonists – Magneto, Phoenix, and the cure – feel packed together, bulging with superglue to hide the storytelling seams, while new characters like Angel, Beast, Juggernaut, and Kid Omega (in name only) barely get anything to do because almost the entire cast has returned from the last two films. It’s a critical mass of screenplay elements, compounded by the fact that almost nothing interesting happens with any of these new toys (with one exception, below); Kitty Pryde does more running but gets hardly any plot action, while The Juggernaut quotes YouTube videos from the mid-2000s. It almost feels as though director Brett Ratner cut ten minutes from each of 10 different X-Men movies and tried to frankenstein them together here; your mileage may vary on which of the ten you’d have rather seen.
5. Oh, my stars and garters. The one thing The Last Stand did unequivocally right was casting Kelsey Grammer as a note-perfect Hank “Beast” McCoy. Grammar leans fully into the role, spot-on casting for a mutant of above average intelligence with a supercilious command over the English language. Kudos to Grammer, too, for submitting to the full-body makeup required for his beastly transformation. And in a film that tries to its detriment to cram everything into its abbreviated runtime, there’s a certain thrill in hearing Grammer deliver Beast’s ostensible catchphrase just before leaping into battle. It’s little wonder that, after Patrick Stewart in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Grammer was the second Fox-era mutant retained for the MCU, in a post-credits cameo from The Marvels. We all know what they say about broken clocks.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: has The Last Stand aged like cheese or wine? Was it ever either? Join us next week for a blast from the past with another exceptional casting choice, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Cinemutants - X2: X-Men United (2003)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2003, it’s X2: X-Men United. After a mutant attempt on the president’s life, the X-Men are scattered when Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox) leads a raid on the Xavier mansion. Logan (Hugh Jackman) leads a group of kids to safety while Professor X (Patrick Stewart) seeks answers from his imprisoned friend Magneto (Ian McKellen). Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) tracks the mutant assassin (Alan Cumming), even as her powers begin to overwhelm her...

1. Empire state of mind. You can take a few different tacks with a sequel, but X2 wears its influence on its sleeve when it comes to The Empire Strikes Back. Like Empire, X2 lets the villains win in the first act, separates our heroes for their own journeys, and then reconvenes the cast for a life-and-death third act. It’s also like its sci-fi forerunner in that it’s arguably better than its predecessor, but while you could make a reasonable case for Star Wars over Empire, it’s hard to say X2 isn’t an improvement in nearly every way from the already-strong X-Men. As immediate sequels go, X2 is in fantastic company, setting the bar in a way that nearly every second MCU installment (Winter Soldier aside) misses.
2. We’re not as alone as you think. The X-Men comics have one of the deepest benches of characters, with so many distinctive faces and abilities across what was then forty years of storytelling. A standout feature of the comics has always been their delightfully soapy quality, with long-running storylines that feel at times more like daytime television. X2 continues the masterful juggling act from the first film and adds in the likes of Colossus, Nightcrawler, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and (after a fashion) Mastermind, with expanded roles for Iceman and Mystique. Surprisingly, the film never quite plays favorites; while some performances are stronger than others, there’s an incredibly balanced approach to the disparate plot threads. (Excepting, I think, Colossus, though his inclusion feels a bit like living scenery for the mansion. We’ll see him get his due in surprising fashion in a few weeks.)
3. The war has begun. While Ian McKellen is pretty safely the best villain the X-Franchise has ever had, Brian Cox is a very close second as William Stryker. In the seminal comic God Loves, Man Kills, Stryker was a televangelist with a rabid anti-mutant agenda; here, he’s the military scientist attempting to exterminate mutantkind, with the added backstory of being the architect of the project that turned Wolverine into Weapon X. Stryker will end up being a subplot that weaves through nearly all of the X-films (often unsuccessfully, as Wolverine’s mysterious origins tend to disappoint the more we tug on that thread). But when you want to anchor a franchise to Hugh Jackman’s performance, it’s helpful to have Brian Cox’s quiet menace lurking in the background, pulling the strings while McKellen gets to have all the snarling, snarky fun befitting a Shakespearean actor of his stature.
4. Have you tried not being a mutant? While everyone’s suddenly upset of late that the X-Men “went woke” (which incoming comics editor Tom Brevoort recently and smartly dismissed as a meaningless "infinitely adaptable scarlet letter" these days), those of us who have been paying attention know that the X-Men have always had a progressive bent, with mutants standing in as a sliding signifier for any tyrannized minority. Stan Lee occasionally claimed not to have intended the subtext, but it’s hard not to read the series without seeing any myriad of political controversies at play. At roughly the same time that Grant Morrison was exploring mutants as queer allegory, X2 is overt with its gay reading of mutants; Bobby Drake’s conversation with his parents reads inescapably like a “coming out” scene, replete with his mother’s tone-deaf “Have you tried not being a mutant?” At every turn, mutants are persecuted, hunted, and enslaved, and X2 is unflinching in allying itself with the oppressed.
5. Something bad is supposed to happen. If X2 is the franchise’s Empire moment, the good guys can’t win outright at the end; Magneto gets away, with an X-recruit in tow, and the whole thing concludes with an invocation of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably the comics’ most iconic and expansive storyline. In it, Jean Grey succumbs to her repressed powers, becoming a cosmic force of unspeakable strength and annihilating an entire solar system. Nearly all of us knew that the first time Jean’s powers malfunction, X2 was promising that the Phoenix was going to rise. It’s tremendously confident to tease the Phoenix in the film’s final frames (a moment that might probably be a post-credits scene today), but we’ll see that the Phoenix often becomes the franchise’s Everest summit, tempting to approach but perilous to scale. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is X2 still one of the best superhero sequels ever made? Or has it aged poorly in the wake of its paler imitators? Join us next week for X-Men: The Last Stand (and it very nearly was).