When Warner announced that Bryan Singer was leaving the third installment of the X-Men-franchise to don the blue and red of Superman and Brett Ratner emerged as his successor, the internet community - spearheaded by Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles - responded with an outcry as if The Godfather was being remade by Dr. Uwe Boll. Before seeing a single frame of the movie the man behind the Rush Hour-movies was doomed as the guy who will destroy the X-Men franchise. Considering that Singer left the franchise in tip top state, with actors who know their roles in and out and a foundation for the story already in place, it appeared to be a hasty judgement. Unfortunately the doubters were right.

Although Ratner will receive all the blame for the failure, there are two other guys who should take the fall with him: screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, whose previous crimes against humanity included Elektra and XXX: State of the Union. This unholy trinity managed to come up with a completely unfocused and badly structured plot, which confuses the viewer from the get-go. This is mainly due to the short runtime of the movie, which clocks in at roundabout 105 minutes. In this short time span, they not only try to fit in the complex Dark Phoenix story, which was hinted at at the end of X2, but almost a dozen subplots as well. We get backgrounds and introductions for new mutants, a war between humans and mutants, a cure for mutancy, characters dealing with several deaths (they didn't pick the title "The Last Stand" for nothing), attempts to explain the relationships between Über-Mutants Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) and the resolution of two love triangles among other things - quite a bold effort. The result is a story which swaps locations and characters so fast that the audience gets dizzy in the process.

Take for example the very start of the movie, which opens with two very short prologues, the first one set twenty years ago with then-friends Magneto and Xavier trying to recruite a young Jean Grey for the School of the Gifted. Then it hops forward to ten years ago where a young mutant tries to cut his wings out of his shoulders. One should imagine that those two characters who are prominently featured before the main titles, should be important for the movie. Guess, again. The hyped Angel (Ben Foster) gets almost no screen-time and the telepathic Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), although being one of the central characters of the story, is reduced to a grimly looking beauty with anger management issues and less lines than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bodybuilding-days. Add to it that the Phoenix story has nothing to do with the comic origins (her Phoenix transformation is explained with her having always had a schizophrenic state of mind) and it becomes evident that Ratner had no real interest and enthusiasm for telling this story. His focus is more on the second main plot of the movie, which deals with the typical social awareness components of the X-Men franchise. While the first movie was more or less about civil rights and X2 could be seen as a "Coming Out"-metaphor, this one works as a commentary on genetic research and the social status of handicapped people. The device for it is a cure against mutancy, extracted from a mutant and developed by the father of Angel. Its official announcement sends shock waves through the mutant community. While individuals like Rogue (Anna Paquin), who desperately wants to be able to touch her boyfriend without killing him, see it as a ray of hope, Magneto and his troops turn Bin Laden and threaten the US with terror attacks if the so-called cure isn't destroyed. Caught in between, as always, are Xavier, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry) et al.

The inevitable forceful confrontation of the different factions gives way for some spectacular action-set-pieces like the destruction of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, yet the action feels rushed. While the two predecessors used action to get from one plot point to the next, Ratner does it the other way round, using the plot to hop through the action scenes, whose only raison d'être seems to be to show off as many different mutants as possible. While all these things maybe could be excused by an always difficult transition between different directors, there's one point Ratner can't be acquitted of - and that's his handling of the well-established characters. Many of the leads completely act out of character, especially the villainous Magneto. Yes, he has always been the bad guy of the series, but whatever you thought of his actions, his motivations were always comprehensible and to some extent even understandable. This is not the case with X-Men: The Last Stand. The movie goes out of its way to tell how open-minded the current presidency has been towards mutants (Kelsey Grammer's "Beast" is established as the secretary for mutant affairs), yet the minute the cure is announced, Magneto turns beserk and into an exchangeable villain with plans for world domination. And as if he would underline the problems of the movie, the theatrical heavyweight Ian McKellen, like his counterpart Patrick Stewart, suddenly starts to ham it up. It is at this point where the X-Men-series finally fulfills its mutation from an extroardinary film-franchise with brains to a run of the mill action blockbuster.