Ratner you HACK!...

...I am convinced these may well be my final words (a close second no doubt to 'don't put that there!..') I have finally made it back to the broadband blogosphere and my Batcave, my Sanctum Sanctorum or whatever that house with no doors that Doctor Fate lives in. After a day travelling on the many public transports of auld Dublin town, (the Luas loses its space age appeal after a while especially after an unknown scanger lifts your digital camera straight out of your jacket) I decided to escape the dreary rain of Norwich to see X-Men III: The Last Stand.

Take my following comments with this in mind, as 'H' reminded me, I think X-Men 2 is one of the best films ever made, and it is one of my favourite films. In a quixotic PhD of superhero movies, X-Men 2 is the only one I look forward to watching repeatedly (has anyone else you known seen Supergirl or Captain America more than once, not too mention risking computer virus madness just to download the awful Justice League pilot from Lime Wire).

Of course The Last Stand had some good bits, the flashback to Grey with the spooky retro-digi bits of Xavier and Magneto, and some of the Phoneix stuff, but why is everything so slapdash and hurried? You know Singer would spend weeks on designing one gun, Ratner seems to tape a bit of crap on onto a hairdrier and go that's fine. In Jean Grey’s house the second time one can almost imagine some hapless PA prodding the frying pans with a stick to imply telekinetic powers. And what the hell was Xavier using to analyse her powers? some sort of plastic rain hat and some ipod headphones stuck near her bosom-type area. This not to mention the whole dodgy i'm building walls in your brain style action and the 'could you leave your daughter alone in a room with too dodgy men you've never met before' scene. ('are you sneaking around in there Charles? Whatever are you looking for?)

Wolverine falls through all those trees, I was expecting at least five seconds of him on the ground all mangled and in bits like C3Po or Robocop in Robocop2 so we could see the limits of his healing mojo but no! on immediately to the next heartless 2 minute burst.

You know it’s a bad film when Vinnie Jones’ ‘I need a pee’ line makes me laugh more than anything else. Vinnie fucking Jones is making me laugh in a film with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in it?! What the fuck. I know it’s a bad film when I think , wow! A Guardians of the Galaxy film would rock! Maybe because I recently got this and was thinking a character called Charlie-27 is a great idea.

In my parallel universe the peerless Angela Bassett plays Storm (and every other Halle Berry role ever, it is a great universe, the Golden Gate bridge is blue but you can always settle) come on, face it, apart from showing her ‘puppies’ in Swordfish what has Halle Berry achieved? She is an atrocious actor, the nearest she should be to the role of Strom is seeing her on a Burger King cup while reading the script for B*A*P*S II: The Jumbo Breakfast Roll.

And all the deaths, Xavier pfft! gone, who’s he? only the cornerstone of the X-universe but whatever, there’s more explosions on the way. And poor Mystique, what is the problem with strong women in the X-Men movies? Deathstryke, Mystique Phoenix, in the words of the Brute, ‘off ya pop!’ X-men movies seem to have a distrubing trend of tolerating powerful women as long as they are within a very patriachal framework and as long as they do not get too much out of control, if they do it's a big stab in the guts by fan-fave Wolverine, come on, Juggernaut calling Kitty Pryde a bitch! now that's just not on, she looks about 12! especially when wee Booby Drake's after ya with his icy nob...

Again I have small niggly problems with all superhero movies but some of the things in this cavalcade of crap were just bad editing: bam! Magneto rips up the golden gate bridge in broad day light because it looks cool, bam! He slaps it down again like a big red rusty lad, bam! It’s night suddenly because the fight sequences look cooler that way…

In conclusion it has the charm and grace of a coprophagy Web site with X-Men 2 as a lovely Japanese lady receiving the ‘package’ and Ratner as a fat fanboy in one of those little baseball hats with a wee propeller on it as the ‘producer’.