The boy and I went to see X Men: The Last Stand on Friday. The geek factor was not as high as you might have imagined: only about a third of the audience gave a knowing chuckle at the Stan Lee cameo. A lot has been written about how Brett Ratner is a hack, couldn't possibly do the franchise justice, etc., but I have to say this movie holds its own with the first two, and even, in some respects, surpasses them. This is partly due to the script--stuff happens in this movie that isn't supposed to happen in a big action franchise, and I really appreciate being surprised. But this movie also zips along at a pretty brisk pace, and we were out of there in an hour and a half. Having recently re-watched the first two, the pace of those is somewhat more...shall we say, langorous. I mean, they're great movies, but I guess I just feel like a movie based on a comic book should just take less than two hours. Actually, I feel that pretty much any movie should take less than two hours. Unless Peter Jackson directs it, and even then, I think he could have trimmed Kong by about a third.
I did have a couple of quibbles, though--one is that Jean Grey looked positively skeletal, even when they weren't trying to make her look like scary Phoenix. I mean, I guess I just find it hard to believe that a guy like Wolverine could maintain this animal attraction for someone who looks like they couldn't enjoy a good meal. (I mean, okay, sure, she's a little thin after spending months, or possibly years at the bottom of a lake, but you'd think she'd get back to a normal-ish appearance after a couple of weeks. Not so.) They were running around trying to figure out what to do about Jean Grey, and I wanted to yell out--"Give her a plate of nachos, for God's sake! Fetch her a sandwich!!" Maybe the whole Dark Phoenix thing was just because she was hungry and cranky.
And my biggest quibble--MAJOR SPOILER--is this.
So the freakin' cure cartridges are lying all over the place, and yet instead of just jabbing her with one like Beast JUST DID to Magneto, (and why'd he need all 4 for that anyway?), Wolverine's gotta kill her. It made great dramatic sense, but just not a whole lot of logical sense.
And yeah, I just said "it didn't make logical sense" about a movie with a hairy blue guy and a guy with a skeleton made of imaginary metal and guy who shoots frickin laser beams out of his eyes. Perhaps the geek factor was somewhat higher than I've let on.

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