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	BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Movie Review: X-men 3 Thursday, June 01, 2006 Movie Review: X-men 3 I'm going to review Xmen 3 here in a minute, but first I wanted to talk about an almost unknown summer action movie that's opening this weekend in the US, and is surely more deserving of your entertainment dollar than the big budget summer snooze fests. It's a French film that they're calling District B13 in the US, but don't let the name throw you. It's basically one of the next generation of Jackie Chan-inspired action films, with agility, speed, inventiveness, and stylized martial arts taking the place of the old style guns and muscles action movies. B13 stars David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli, neither of whom you're likely to have heard of. Cyril is best known as one of the identical twin blonde badguys in the Jet Li film Kiss of the Dragon. He was the smaller one, the one who could actually fight, and he's apparently something of an action film star in France. David Belle is not an actor, but he's pretty well known on the Internet for sort of inventing the new, death-defying urban sport of Parkour. It's basically a sort of improvisational gymnastics, performed on the balconies, ladders, walkways, stair cases, and ledges of high rise buildings, and while I've been seeing amazing movies of guys doing this stuff on the Internet for a few years, I've never yet seen it in a motion picture. (Unless you count some of the agility stuff Jackie Chan does.) Don't take my word for it though; here's a (subtitled) French TV segment on David Belle with tons of footage of him doing his thing, and here's a fantastic 3 minute scene from District B13 with more cool stunts than most action movies pack into their full 120 running time. Really, calling them stunts isn't fair, since they're more like feats or performance art; they aren't digitally erasing the wires on those guys leaping between 6 story buildings; they're really doing those stunts live and a slip away from death. Are you intrigued, but thinking the movie must be crap with some good stunts? You might be right, but they're really, really good stunts, since as of right now, this is the best reviewed film of the year. It's got 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and all 15 are positive. If you go to the movies this weekend and subject yourself to the anti-romcom misery of The Break-Up (21% RT, 0% from major critics) instead of seeking out the wild action fun of District B13, you are making a really big mistake, and you must have a really lame girlfriend. (I'm lucky here, since Malaya's more excited to see District B13 than I am.) As for Xmen3... it wasn't bad. We went in expecting a fun action movie, and while the script wasn't a 10% as smart as the twisty Mission Impossible 3, it wasn't awful. The movie moved along nicely, none of the characters were unwatchable, the teenage angst crap was kept to a minimum, the 2x4 "mutant = gay" societal metaphors were subtler, and the action scenes were done nicely. I didn't think it was a masterpiece, but it was a fun summer movie, and I definitely liked it more than Xmen 1 or 2, both of which pretty much bored me. To the scores: X-men 3, 2006 Script/Story: 6 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: 8 Combat Realism: 7 Humor: 5 Eye Candy: 6 Fun Factor: 6 Replayability: 7 Overall: 6.5 You can see my reviews of X-men 1 and X-men 2 by clicking their golden names, and I'll just add that I gave them a 5 and a 5.5, respectively. This one I gave a 6.5, which isn't a huge improvement, but I did think it was better. This puts me in the minority, since the critical consensus of the 3 films, going by the RottenTomatoes scores, were 80%, 87%, and 54%. I think a lot of the low scores for this one were pre-judged, by critics hearing about Brian Singer leaving and Brett Ratner coming in, the production being rushed to beat Singer's Superman movie that's due later this summer, etc. Most of the critical comments I've read said things about how this film felt rushed, that the characters needed more time to be delved into, that there were too many mutants with too many powers, etc. They have a point, but I thought some of those things were improvements. My main dislikes about the first two films were the excessive scenes of whiny, mopey teenagers, the stupid use (or non-use) of mutant powers, and Storm and Cyclops being actively painful when on screen. Xmen 3 improves in all those areas by largely removing the Dawson's Creek style "my life as an outcast teenager is so hard" bullshit, making the mutant powers on display more logical and timely and practical, giving Cyclops almost no screen time at all, and turning Halle Barry's formerly unwatchable Storm into a pretty good character. Xavier continued to be kind of a whiny bitch, but Magneto was still cool, Wolverine was good, and all of the newly-introduced mutants were well-used and not overly annoying. The plot wasn't great; it was very point A to point B, and didn't have anything even approaching a twist. No one ever did anything you didn't pretty much expect them to do and most of their actions were necessitated by the plot, but I will give the movie credit for killing off or greatly-changing quite a few major characters. I thought most of the events could have been handled better, and we passionlessly saw a lot of things we should have felt a much stronger emotional attachment to, but I thought it was a better film than the first two, and I certainly enjoyed it more. The real mystery for me was Storm. I would have paid money to have her killed off in movies 1 or 2, or at least for her to have been written out of movie 3. I didn't know if it was her character, her awful Rapunzel wig, or Halle Barry's performance, but whatever the reason, she was actually interesting in this film. She finally got to use some of her powers, she had a lot of dialogue, and while I didn't think her performance was ever more than adequate, it was a much better part. My knee jerk theory, which could probably be easily-disproved, is that the change in directors made all the difference. It was really the script, but assuming the directors had some hand in that, I'll continue. Brian Singer directed X1 and X2, and while I can't remember if he's openly gay or not, ever gossip blog entry I see about him treats his all-male pool parties and strong attachment to various male stars as a matter of fact aspect of his life. (Google says... he's out.)As for Brett Ratner, he's notoriously heterosexual, and has been linked to numerous hot starlets, female athletes, models, etc. Singer seems to be a good director, and yes, most people liked X1 and X2 more than X3, but I didn't like the character interaction stuff that much in the first two, with so much of it feeling full of ham-handed efforts to score societal points about mutants and people not accepting them, with very obvious equivalencies to current issues with homosexuality. I'm not saying there aren't parallels, and I'm certainly sympathetic to his efforts, but I had, "Enough, already!" reactions to a lot of scenes in the first two films. The Ice Kid's awkward family meeting with his mom's well-meaning, "Can't you just try not to be a mutant?" dialogue was groan-inducing, in X2. At the same time, the female characters were either annoying, or perfect and loved, in X1 and X2. Well, except for Mystique, but she's never really female in anything but having boobs, as she secret agents her way through the films, killing, disguising, spying, and so forth. In X3, as I've already said, the teen-centric, "Is this a mutant academy or a day care center?" aspects were way toned down in X3, and the female characters were much more interesting. Mystique was the same as ever, and Rogue and the other kids didn't do much, but Storm was 1000% better, Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix was far more interesting than her cutesy love-triangle stuff in the first 2 films, and new addition Kitty Pryde felt like a real person, rather than being all cloying and needy, like most of the kids were in X1 and X2. If the far more interesting female leads in X3, and their increased humanity, vulnerability, and ferocity were due to the director or script, it's hard to say. And I can't say if Ratner's heterosexuality gave him more insight and interest in the women characters than the apparently-homosexual Singer possessed. But it's a possibility that occurred to me, as I pondered one of the major differences between the Xmen films. Singer's other films include Apt Pupil and The Usual Suspects; I've never seen the first but the novel has zero female characters, and there's hardly a woman onscreen in the Usual Suspects. Of Ratner's other films I won't even mention Rush Hour 1 and 2, since there aren't any women of importance in them, but there's not any acting either. Red Dragon is the only other film of his I've seen, and it's not much to compare either, with 90% of the film being a police procedural, the only woman being the detective's terrified wife (who does come through strong in the end), and most of the scenes taking place between Ed Norton and Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter. Anyway, I'm not saying gay male directors can't direct women, or craft realistic female characters... just that Bryan Singer appears unable to do so. Even in comparison to a special effects director like Brett Ratner. Labels: movie review Posted by: Flux # 6:29 AM Comments: I liked 2 the best by far, with 1 next and then 3. The thing is, when asked about this, I can't come up with very many specific reasons I had that reaction to 3. I definitely did not like Jean Grey's character in the third one. Essentially she stands around and looks constipated through most of the movie. Totally different character from the comic books. But...I'm basically OK with deviating from the comic books...poetic license and all that. It works OK for some characters but not as well for others...that's fine. But with Jean Grey/Phoenix in particular it struck the wrong chord with me. I'm also fine with killing off major characters...they're in a war, there's going to be casualties. Good parallels to the comic include: Storm being a leader. (Although she's much more serious in the comic books.) Juggernaut's character was portrayed well. Wolverine has been spot on throughout all 3 movies. And Magneto has probably been my favorite. Oh, and Beast was done well, too (but I'm sort of disappointed they had a different actor in 2 and 3). Deviations include: Rogue is older in the comics and a much more powerful mutant. Iceman is way off; he's more of a loner/wild-card (irresponsible) in the comics than Wolverine is. Overall the movie series stands up well, with 2 being my favorite. #: 9:30 AM posted by Anonymous A big part for Storm's place in this movie is that Halle Barry threatened not to be in the it unless they gave a lot more screen time to her character and delved into her a lot more. Judging by your comments (I'm going next week), she got her way and they managed to pull it off decently. Apt Pupil has got massive homoeroticism in it, so much so that [i]all[/i] of my straight friends noticed it and commented on it. #: 12:30 AM posted by Anonymous re: comment #2 I read something about Halle Berry demanding a bigger role in the movie last week before I saw the movie, maybe this: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/preview/1808490829 ...and every time she was in a scene with a central role that's what my mind went to. The role was closer to the comics than previously, though. #: 1:12 AM posted by Anonymous Lanth's got a point, but homoerotic and "can't direct females" are different things. Not that he said they were the same. I didn't think there was any homoerotic stuff in the first 2 xmen movies, unless your gadar is so fine-tuned that any shirtless or leather clad guy is an example of it. I'm almost surprised there wasn't; Ian McKellan's Magneto seems sort of gay (though that's obviously tinged by knowing the actor is gay himself) but it's far from overt, and it certainly could be, with him taking troubled young male mutants under his wing. #: 4:34 AM posted by Flux What those guys are doing in the videos really is amazing. I thought the instances where they were jumping from a ledge to a pole and back was pretty remearkable, as that would take a tremendous amount of balance and muscle control. But was it really necessary to walk up all the railings next to the walkways? It's a bit like impressing someone with your ability to juggle chainsaws and following it up with a demonstration of your ability to throw a ball straight up in the air and catch it. #: 8:47 PM posted by Donnie (aka Shadowtwin) I still wasn't particularly impressed with Halle Barry's acting in X-men 3. It wasn't as bad as the first two, and the change in hair made her look less goofy at least. As for Singer being unable to direct female actors, I think there is a flaw in the theory. Yeah, Storm sucked in X-men 1 and 2, but Jean Gray didn't. For that matter, even Rebecca Stamos' Mystique was pretty good in the first two movies, and she can't act! I think any problems with Storm were entirely on the shoulders of Halle Barry's acting, and the resentment she had about the only strong black female roles in movies being a comic book character (I remember seeing her complain about that somewhere when the first movie came out) #: 5:17 AM posted by Anonymous Post a Comment << Home Archives May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2012

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