PG-13
X-Men 3 is not horrible. It’s not embarrassing, it does not stumble fatally, it does not betray the comic or the characters or the earlier movies.

But it’s not very good either, and that’s a shame.

Remember X-Men 2, when Magneto was imprisoned in a plastic cell? And Mystique injected the guard with iron, so that later, when the guard came into Magneto’s cell, Magneto was able to pull the metal from the guard’s blood, then forming the metal into tiny ball bearings which, using his magnetic powers, he whipped into a tornado of destruction, tearing his cell to bits while simultaneously achieving freedom and demonstrating his startling intellect and might?

That was brilliant writing, a triumph of imagination, and of special effects and movie storytelling in service to imagination.

You will not find that in the new movie, a flatter, shallower incarnation of Brian Singer’s comic-book epic…maybe because director Brian Singer is absent, gone off to make a Superman movie.

Which we look forward to.

The new movie plods, telling the oh-so-exciting story of Jean Grey’s transformation into the Phoenix, but in a dull way. Certainly, folks being torn atom-from-atom by freakish psychic powers is exciting, but at the end of the day the story still lacks the basic glint of imagination that the earlier films had, generally substituting brute force in place of storytelling creativity.

The movie wobbles on other levels as well: while Nightcrawler was a brilliant addition in X2, Beast is not-so-great in X3. Kelsey Grammer is entirely adequate as the brainy blue mutant, but the makeup and effects are not, making him look like a ghoulish blue zombie half the time, and like a puffy stuffed suit the rest—hardly the uncanny embodiment of, say, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

A final hope? That as the movies are very episodic, and could continue indefinitely, Brian Singer could come back, defining X3 as simply a low point.