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.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

The kindest thing I can say about Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction is that it reminded me very much of the fireworks show I saw on the Fourth of July this year.  In both cases, I attended out of a mix of curiosity, a mild sense of obligation, and a persistent feeling in the back of my mind that I was going to be disappointed.  And in both cases, I got exactly what I expected.

For that reason, I feel less inclined to berate Transformers: Age of Extinction than my readers might be expecting.  I knew precisely what to expect, and my expectations were pretty low, allowing me to take the fourth Transformers film for what it really is:  the cinematic equivalent of a fireworks show, all bombast and no bravura.  So I won’t even do the usual plot summary, because the plot can be summarized almost exclusively by naming actors and shouting onomatopoeias in all capital letters.

Fortunately, some very talented actors – Mark Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammer, and Stanley Tucci among them – are cashing what ought to have been very easy paychecks, and they’re more than capable of engaging an audience just on ethos alone.  They’re reliable and stable performers, and to be perfectly honest they, together with the budget, are what separate this film from a straight-to-DVD release.  It’s not particularly innovative, remaining in a very real sense indistinguishable from the three films that preceded it.  All one should expect from a Transformers film at this point is a series of very big, very loud, and slightly dumb explosions – which this Transformers delivers, and how.

At two hours and forty-five minutes, however, it’s absurdly long, baggy and bloated.  The words “There are too many robots” should not be an issue with a Transformers film, and yet there are far too many characters who come and go for reasons that can only be described as “plot.”  There are at least five factions of Transformers in the film, most of which are devoid of personality (and the ones with characterizations are viciously broad caricatures, like the samurai Transformer voiced by Ken Watanabe and the gun-toting Transformer voiced by John Goodman).  Only some of them are visually interesting – especially the dinosaur Transformers – but there’s little need for them in a film that very much resembles its main characters – lifeless, bulky, and clunky.

Sidebar:  one of my biggest cinematic pet peeves is when a film doesn’t properly introduce characters, such that I forget or never learn character names.  I think I can name about three Transformers in a cast of dozens.

Characterization aside, Transformers: Age of Extinction is a brutally tone-deaf feature, likely hard of hearing as a result of the amplified volume from the first three films.  The film barely has two settings – loud and very loud – and the pacing is astonishingly uneven while still managing to remain perfectly predictable.  There seem to be two distinct plots going on here – the American government’s pursuit of the Autobots and one corporation’s attempt to make their own Transformers – and either one of them would have made a decent enough film.  But since they’re thrown together into a film that is far more interested in explosions than in ideas, they’re reduced to what Mark Kermode has called “the loudest common denominator.”  Now, I realize that asking for ideas in a Transformers movie is like asking for a soufflé in a McDonalds, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the barest pretense of an idea.

What’s more, the film manages to be staggering insensitive, throwing around racial stereotypes to make the cast of Deadwood blush (for example, every Asian character is a master of some form of martial arts).  More patently offensive, Transformers boasts a neverending slew of quintessentially leery camera angles from Bay in which young women in tight/short clothing bend over things in slow-motion while the camera practically salivates over their lithe bodies.  It’s an eyeroll of the highest order to begin with, because Bay seems to be one of the only filmmakers outside of pornography not to realize that it’s the 21^st century and we’re all trying to be a bit more enlightened than that, but what makes it worse is that the film attempts to lecture us about sexualizing young women while doing exactly that.  There’s a loathsome moment where Wahlberg asks his daughter to dress more conservatively, which almost sounds like Bay reprimanding himself, but the camera is actually poised behind actress Nicola Peltz while apparently attempting to film directly up the leg of her shorts.

Aside from the perverse leering, aside from the casual racism, aside from the problems of pacing and length, and aside from the thin characterizations, every once in a while Transformers: Age of Extinction does manage to be a little bit of fun.  There are a few decent eyeball kicks, and Stanley Tucci is a real treat as always (it’s just too bad the film doesn’t actually know what to do with him).  But it is ultimately as mindless and as ephemeral as a fireworks show, but a good deal louder and very nearly unbearably longer.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language and brief innuendo.”  There are more robots punching robots and exploding than you could possibly imagine, and the film is replete with sexual objectification of female characters in tight clothing and accompanying light misogyny (“She looks hot”).  There’s one particularly well-timed F-bomb from Tucci and several other profanities of the scatological variety.