Holy shit! Remember how good the last movie was?! This one is really getting set up to be possibly the best film of the franchise! Wait, Bryan Singer is leaving the project? And wait, he’s leaving to do a fucking shitty Superman movie?! Superman sucks! Well, I’m sure they’ll get someone equally as talented to fill his shoes. Wait…did you say Brett Ratner? Brett “Rush Hour” Ratner? Oh, well, that makes sense, considering the relationship between Cyclops and Wolverine is so similar to the dichotomy between Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. And you said Halle Berry threatened to leave the franchise because she wasn’t used enough in the previous two films?  Thank Cthulhu, there really is hope for the franchise! Wait, you said they want her in the series, so they are making her MORE important?! Well, fuck me, this movie is going to suck.

 

It’s funny, because right now EVERYONE in this scene is trying to pretend that it’s not just Frasier with blue hair.

We see Professor X walk out of a car, yes, you read that correctly, he WALKED out of a car, that’s how you know things are wacky. Who else walks out of the car? Magneto! They are friends?! What is this wackiness?! Apparently it was the past, and we see the happy couple visiting the home of Jean Grey as a young child, where we see how she’s even more powerful than we were led to believe previously. We then see a young boy in a bathroom, doing something he isn’t supposed to. Not masturbating, no, rather he is grinding his newly developed mutant wings off of his back. Gross! Then there’s that whole intro thing and we cut to our familiar X-Men in the heat of battle, where we notice a lack of Cyclops, yet the addition of Colossus, Iceman, Rogue, and Shadowcat. By the way, Colossus can give himself a metal exoskeleton and Shadowcat can pass through walls, and we see them defeating a mutant-hunting Sentinal robot, only to realize this was all part of a Danger Room simulation. Both the Sentinals and the Danger Room are things found in the comics and cartoon series, so clearly Brett Ratner is giving the fans what they want! Haha, just kidding. Cyclops is still distraught over the death of Jean and he goes to the lake where she died, only to see her come back to life, and, well, kill him. Sorry dude. We then see a big blue furry guy who is Hank McCoy, who is the X-Man known as Beast. The funniest part? We see him reading a magazine…only to pan out and see that he’s reading it while hanging from the ceiling! We had no idea!

 

What else is funny is that James Marsters had a tiny part in this movie because he was busy filming Superman Returns with Bryan Singer instead. What’s not funny? Making Famke Janssen less attractive by giving her shitty red hair.

The plot centers around a mutant who “leeches” powers off of mutants, and through research, he is studied and doctors have created a cure. This is good for some people, bad for others. People like Rogue, who are embarrassed of their mutation, are all for it, and people like Magneto are pissed. Magneto being the typical pissed off Magneto forms a gang of mutant fighters, a “Brotherhood”, if you will, to put a stop to it. Really the only new character that is at all worth mentioning is Juggernaut, whose mutant power is that once he builds up momentum, nothing can stop him. More importantly, Jean Grey is back, and more powerful and crazy than ever. She leaves Xavier’s mansion and heads back to her home, where she is found by both the good guys and the bad guys. These guys fight and the fight ends with Jean Grey disintegrating Professor Xavier. Whoops! Magneto runs to the woods to build up a big army of mutant bad guys to storm the facility where the cure is being developed, and then the X-Men show up to stop them. In the process, the doctor developing it gets killed, and but Magneto gets stabbed with the cure by Beast, thus losing his mutant powers. Jean Grey sees this and is pissed, and she starts disintegrating everything and everyone, with the only one able to get through being Wolverine, who stabs her and she dies. Back at Xavier’s mansion, we learn that Rogue was able to get the cure so she can now touch her boyfriend. The movie ends with seeing Magneto sitting by himself with a chess set, staring at one metal piece, and just as we see it move slightly, the credits roll. Don’t worry, after the credits there is a scene where we hear Professor X’s voice comes from a dead guy or something, paving the way for a hopeful Ratner return! Fuck my life.

 

The real Juggernaut is much more veiny in the arm areas.

Let me try to get the “positive” things out of the way, which, well, are up for debate on whether or not they actually are positive. Two of the more well received X-Men titles, by both fans and critics, were Astonishing X-Men, by Joss Whedon, and Ultimate X-Men, by, I think a bunch of people. Considering Brett Ratner had no idea what he was doing, he clearly stole things from these titles. For example, the first storyline from Astonishing X-Men is titled “Gifted”, and is about a cure being created for mutants. Also, in the Danger Room segment, Wolverine and Colossus perform a “fastball special”, where Colossus throws wolverine at something, which isn’t something only found in Astonishing X-Men exclusively, but the framing of that sequence looks like it was ripped right from the pages of that book. As far as Ultimate X-Men goes, he stole Storm’s shitty haircut, as well as ripped a scene directly from it where Shadowcat and Iceman bond by having Iceman freeze a pond on the campus and the two of them ice skating. Sure, I suppose you could say these were his attempt at paying homage, for which he could have chosen worse titles to do that with, but to most readers of the comics, I think it was obvious that he was just stealing.

 

Oh yeah, and that little kid in the beginning ends up becoming Angel when he gets older. Good for him.

How fucking terrible was Beast in this movie? He was played by Kelsey Grammer, who actually sounds like a good choice. So what’s the problem? I guess just the way he looked in every scene, as well as every fucking line of dialogue. We get it, Beast is smart, he wears a suit, but do you have to make him sound like a pretentious douchebag even while fighting everyone? Fuck, he sucked so bad. Now let’s talk about Juggernaut…boy oh boy, motherfucking Juggernaut. First off, this guy is supposed to be HUGE, I mean, fucking massive, so you get the guy to look like he is 7 feet tall? Okay sure, that’s big, but not big enough. I’m also willing to forget the fact that there’s a scene where Leech takes away Juggernaut’s power, despite the fact that he isn’t a mutant and actually gets his powers from a magical crystal. As if Beast’s dialogue wasn’t bad enough, Juggernaut’s made him look like a fucking genius by comparison. I kid you not, there is one bit of dialogue that was taken right from a funny internet video…yes, a Hollywood movie looked to viral videos for inspiration for the line where Juggernaut says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw on the DVD that the scene immediately following that had a line that they deleted where he says, “Heeeere’s Juggy”. Here’s Juggy. Goddammit, I feel dumber just typing that.

 

You’re thinking that her red wardrobe is symbolic, don’t you? Well, you’re right. Not symbolic of the Phoenix, but symbolic of this bitch acting like she’s on her period.

I know that a movie shouldn’t be judged by what’s on the DVD deleted scenes, but as previously mentioned with the Juggernaut dialogue, it couldn’t be made more apparent how Brett Ratner knew NOTHING about how to make this movie. There are multiple deleted scenes where we see the opposite of what happened in the official release, such as a filmed alternate ending where Rogue doesn’t get the cure. And another alternate ending involving Wolverine going back to the bar we met him at in the first film. And another alternate ending where we see school starting back up at Xavier’s mansion. Obviously he had no idea what would be the best for the story, or any of the characters, so he just shot a whole bunch of shit, threw it together, and waited to see what test audiences disliked the least. Not to mention the fact that he included two different versions of a scene where Pyro comes down the stairs to tell Magneto about the cure, Magneto looks up and says, “Thank you.” One version says “clean shaven version”, and the other says “bearded version”. The difference? The clean shaven version shows Magneto looking up and saying, “Thank you,” while clean shaven, the other, he looks up and says, “Thank you,” and has a beard. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN GAINED OR LOST BY THE AMOUNT OF FACIAL HAIR ON HIS FACE AS HE DELIVERS THE LINE “THANK YOU”?! GODDAMN YOU BRETT RATNER, YOU FAT FUCKING IDIOT. Despite Brett Ratner’s best efforts to ruin everything, it’s still an X-Men movie, and it’s still better than Elektra.

 

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