 X-Men: The Last Word is not just a comic book brought to the screen. It's a Marvel comic book with ideas brought to screen, several critics observe. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times notes that there are enough parallels with current politics "that to list them is to define the next presidential campaign." While Ebert does express some misgivings about the film, he concludes that overall, he enjoyed it. "I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects." Jan Stuart in Newsday also is impressed, writing: "It is a testament to the thoroughgoing craft and seriousness of purpose with which the first two X-Men installments were made that all of the primary players have returned for this bruising and brooding go-round, which loses little in urgency, complexity or muscularity for being the shortest of the trilogy." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal figures that the latest X-Men beats its forerunners. "Surprise, surprise," he writes. The latest sequel "has shifted the shape of the franchise from pretty good, if uninspired, to terrifically entertaining." That opinion is not shared by Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post, who complains that director Brett Ratner has failed to do justice to the Marvel superheroes the way his predecessor, Bryan Singer, had in the first two X-Men films. Ratner, she writes, "makes a hash of the story and characters ... delivering a pumped-up exercise in mayhem, carnage and blunt-force trauma." Similarly Geoff Pevere writes in the Toronto Star: "Seen in purely commercial terms, X-Men: The Last Stand is likely to deliver the basic goods to people merely looking to have their skulls rattled on a summer afternoon. To anyone more discerning, and certainly to those fans who cherished the way the first two movies took pains to honor what made the X-Men such special mutants, the final blowout will seem like a blown opportunity." And Lou Lumenick in the New York Post concludes: "The Last Stand isn't awful, but Ratner lacks Singer's subtlety and ability to cleanly navigate convoluted story lines crammed with super-powered characters." On the other hand, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times sees little difference between the Singer and Ratner X-Men. The latest film, she writes, "pretty much looks and plays like the first films, though perhaps with more noise and babe action and a little less glum." |
