The legion of mutants with superpowers who populate the X-Men comics and movies, designed to appeal to a legion of young moviegoing and comic-reading misfits, face their biggest challenge in the special effects extravaganza that is X-Men: The Last Stand.
It's billed as the last film in the X-Men movie trilogy, but is it? That's open to question. Those few diehards who sit through about five minutes of credits at the end of the movie are in store for the film's most startling moment. Suddenly, much of what has gone before is in question. Aha! you will say, and know much more than all your friends who fled the theater the moment the credits began rolling.
X-Men: The Last Stand is a movie geared to insiders. I won't say that those new to the peculiar world of X-Men won't have a good time. But it helps to have more than a cursory acquaintance with such characters as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the hairy man who can unleash metal claws from the tips of his fingers, or Storm (Halle Berry), a woman who can whip up a sudden thunderstorm on a whim. Certainly it would help to have some background knowledge of Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the silken-voiced master of telepathy who many years earlier had founded a campus for young people with strange powers who had been shunned by their peers as mutants, or of Magneto (Ian McKellen), who can control and manipulate metal.
Magneto is the tolerant Xavier's opposite and rival. Xavier wants to use the mutants' powers to help humankind; Magneto leads a revolt of rebellious mutants against the humans who have repressed them. Magneto and his followers are in an uproar because of a new drug which allegedly can "cure" them of their mutant superpowers and make them as ordinary and bland as every other mortal. Some are eager to line up for shots of the drug. But many others don't want to give up such powers as the ability to freeze things at the touch of a fingertip, like the Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), or shape-shift at will, like Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).
All these characters are presented as is. Those who haven't seen them before will have to play instant catch-up in X-Men: The Last Stand, trying to sort out characters and relationships on the fly. In a movie where even the recognizable Kelsey Grammer is unrecognizable under dark blue skin and fur, you can't always tell the players without a scorecard. On the other hand, even first timers will be awed by the film's most impressive sight, when the Golden Gate Bridge lifts up off its foundations and becomes airborne over San Francisco Bay.
The plot is both simple and philosophical and some will be able to relate to its deeper questions with great emotion. How far would a person go to "fit in" with the majority? Or would he prefer to keep his individuality and special abilities? Such questions were asked in the 1950s in such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and are surfacing again today.
You may come for the special effects, but the real strength of the X-Men books and movies has been their ability to ponder questions of the worth of superpowers and individuality over conformity. New-to-X-Men director Brett Ratner, whose films have ranged from the whiz-bang momentum of the Rush Hour movies to the disappointing After the Sunset with Pierce Brosnan, has taken over from Bryan Singer and maintains the balance between special effects and sober meaning.
A major subplot revolves around the resurrection of Jean Gray (Famke Janssen), a mutant with extraordinarily powerful telekinetic and telepathic abilities, able to lift automobiles with her mind. Jean seemed to die heroically at the end of X2, but now she's back with stronger powers which are coveted by both sides of the "cure" controversy. In her conscious state she can control her powers, but in her unconscious state she's called The Phoenix and is out of control. One is never sure which one of her dual personalities will react to new dangers or which side she'll ultimately be on, questions that give X-Men: The Last Stand its edginess.
The film's plot actually begins 20 years earlier, when the young Jean's amazing abilities first came to the attention of Xavier and Magneto, each of whom will eventually try to use those powers for his own ends.
In the present, however, the more pressing question is of that "cure," whose origins lie in the bloodstream of a strange young bald man who is held as a privileged captive by a pharmaceutical company on Alcatraz Island. The film, too, has its own Birdman of Alcatraz, this time a young man who has sprouted enormous white wings. He is the son of the pharmaceutical house CEO who says the drug firm has come up with antibodies that will suppress the mutant gene and turn the mutants "normal."
Throughout X-Men: The Last Stand these characters and more collide and retreat and collide again, especially the musclebound Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), who wears a bullet-shaped helmet and can barrel his way through walls. In one of the film's most explosive moments, Jean and Xavier rip a house apart and send it flying off its foundations in a test of wills. But despite the fabulousness of the many effects, it's the characters and their very human problems that will linger in the memory. And that's the neatest trick of all.
mjanuson@projo.com / 401-277-7276
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X-Men: The Last Stand
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Vinnie Jones, Patrick Stewart, Ben Foster, Michael Murphy.
Rated: PG-13, contains violence, adult themes.
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