"X-Men: The Last Stand"

A new director takes too many liberties with the popular comic-book film franchise, but captures its poetry and pathos.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, X-Men

Photo by 20th Century Fox

Famke Janssen and Hugh Jackman in "X-Men: The Last Stand."

May 26, 2006 | Very early in "X-Men: The Last Stand," a fair-haired, preteen mutant -- we don't yet know his name -- stands in front of his bathroom mirror in tears, struggling to complete some barbaric grooming ritual that we can't quite see. His father bangs on the bathroom door, knowing, as we do, that the boy is trying to hide something -- but what? The camera gives us a few quick clues: First, a few household implements streaked with blood, which the boy has thrown to the floor, frustrated by their uselessness; then a scatter of white feathers on the pristine tiles. But the frustration on the kid's tear-stained face is even more distressing than the suggestion of his self-mutilation. So we're not particularly surprised or shocked when the camera shows us, not directly but reflected in the bathroom mirror, the bony, bloody bumps on this kid's back: He's been trying to hack the feathered wings that sprout from both sides of his bony spine -- to literally clip the very wings that set him apart from everyone else he knows.

The brutal beauty of the image is a mini-encapsulation of the appeal of the "X-Men" comics, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby more than 40 years ago: For lots of kids, these stories of mutants who band together to fight evil have been a metaphorical salve for the way our bodies turn against us in adolescence -- or maybe more specifically for the way, during adolescence and even beyond, our sexual impulses sometimes seem to be fighting against us. But what's most surprising about this small, lovely sequence in "X-Men: The Last Stand" is that it's been given to us by perhaps the last director we'd think would be capable of such bluntly effective poetry: Brett Ratner made a name for himself with the hugely popular but instantly forgettable "Rush Hour" movies, clattery action pictures with chunks of metal for brains. The first two pictures in the "X-Men" franchise, the smart, emotionally complex "X-Men" and the slightly less rich but no less entertaining "X2: X-Men United," were both directed by Bryan Singer, who clearly understood the lush emotional possibilities of the material. I suspect many fans of the first two pictures feared, as I did, that Ratner would simply make a mess of the third.

The good news is that "The Last Stand" is only half a mess -- and even with all its flaws, it's an enjoyable diversion that shows both respect and affection for the formidable legacy of the "X-Men" comics. That's not to say that Ratner and his screenwriters, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, haven't taken some bodacious liberties with the source material. "The Last Stand" is based partly on "The Dark Phoenix Saga," by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, an operatically intense work in which Dr. Jean Grey, or Phoenix (played in the movies by Famke Janssen), becomes a Kali-like creature whose destructive impulses are strong enough to obliterate whole solar systems -- but who also still has the physical and, to an extent, the emotional makeup of the "good" Phoenix, which means her colleagues are torn between destroying her and saving her.

If radical departure from the original text is going to rob you of sleep, don't even bother to see "X-Men: The Last Stand": Ratner uses only the essential ideas of "The Dark Phoenix Saga," and he enlarges certain characters' roles while diminishing others. But while he could have stuck a bit more closely to the "Dark Phoenix" narrative than he did, "The Last Stand" at least retains some of the spirit of the source material. And particularly in the finale, Ratner manages to capture some of its majesty.

Next page: A "cure" for mutancy?