X-Men: The Last Stand
The first two X-Men films work on both a fun and an intellectual level. I'm not comparing them to Citizen Kane or anything, but they made you think a little bit if you wanted to, got you invested in most of the characters and entertained the hell out of you. X3 (as I'll call it in the interest of brevity) is a completely mindless film which derails all the hard work and deliberation that was put into the first two pictures. Granted, it doesn't jump the tracks as badly as Superman III or Batman Forever but then again their predecessors weren't as good as X-Men and X2.
In this "final" installment (more on that later), a pharmaceutical company has engineered a cure for the mutant X gene responsible for all the superhuman abilities some of these people possess. That doesn't sit well with Magneto, the leader of the bad mutants (the Brotherhood), who thinks humans will try to cure all of them whether they want it or not. It doesn't sit well with the good mutants (the X-Men) either, but they feel the cure is a choice (albeit a bad one), and they're not about to go to war with humanity over it.
Meanwhile, Dr. Jean Grey survived her act of heroism at the end of X2, but her uncontrollable alter ego, Phoenix, emerged with her and chaos ensues. Phoenix is the most powerful mutant in the world, capable of doing just about anything with a single thought, but all that unbridled power also shuts down her moral compass.
The story has all the makings of the same character-driven morality play found in the first two films, but neither the screenwriters (Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn) nor the director (Brett Ratner) seem to have a handle on the smart material left behind by Bryan Singer when he abandoned the franchise to make Superman Returns and took X2 screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris with him. In fact, part of me wonders if Ratner actually watched the first two films.
What happened to Nightcrawler? And what about the plot line at the end of X2 when it was revealed the president was a mutant? In X3 the president is mutant friendly, appointing newcomer Dr. Hank McCoy (better known as Beast, or Frasier) as Secretary of Mutant Affairs, but there's no mention of the last film's suggestion. This one is simply too self aware that it's the last film in the franchise and tries to cram too many mutants into the mix while blowing up as much stuff as possible, leading to laughable continuity gaffs among other things. My favorite: Magneto's climactic attack on the pharmaceutical company's Alcatraz headquarters turns from daytime to night in a single cut.
The moral of the X-Men stories isn't a complicated one, but the concept is clearly above Ratner's head. Characters make tough choices that he either doesn't get or couldn't care less about, and he polishes off the proceedings with not one, but two gutless Hollywood endings, one before and one after the credits. (This is the last film, but just in case we want to make another one...) The complete lack of pathos that should be borne from the trilogy's resolution is incredibly aggravating.
I guess as a stand alone film, X-Men 3: The Last Stand is mindless summer escapism. But that's not what the first two films are, and this one deserved better.