20 Years Later, X-Men: The Last Stand Is Somehow Not The Worst X-Men Movie
The durable mutants almost perished in 2006. Who knew this wasn't their lowest point ever?
Superhero fatigue, or at least the accusations of superhero fatigue, are nothing new. And if you were to ask people leaving the movie theater on May 26, 2006 — following a viewing of X-Men: The Last Stand — if the superhero genre was finally, and truly entering into a period of diminishing returns, the answers would have been a resounding yes. But although the X-Men would experience a massive comeback in 2011 with First Class, the strange irony of The Last Stand’s bad reputation, 20 years later, is that it’s not even close to being the worst X-Men movie, nor even among the worst superhero movies ever.
Following the beloved X2 in 2004, X-Men: The Last Stand, suffered partly because of the existence of another 2006 superhero movie, Superman Returns. Five key people from X2, including director Bryan Singer, composer John Ottman, writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty, and actor James Marsden (Cyclops), were all pulled away from X3 to work on Superman Returns. Brett Ratner eventually replaced Bryan Singer, which today is a bizarre downgrade from one problematic director to another. Or to put it another way, at least The Last Stand is better than Ratner’s most recent film, Melania.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that separating the art from the artist enters into gymnast-levels of intellectual dissonance when looking back on the early X-Men films. But we can all probably agree that the various cast members — from Patrick Stewart to Hugh Jackman to Famke Janssen to Halle Berry — all did their best to carry this totally uneven film. X3 also began a strange tradition of putting Professor X into an early grave, which, to date, has shockingly happened three times total: The Last Stand, Logan (2017), and in his very brief appearance in 2022’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. (Fun fact, the latter film came out on the same day as the debut of Picard Season 2 and Strange New Worlds Season 1, which also featured Patrick Stewart and Anson Mount in starring roles. Weird, right?)
In any case, the early destruction of Professor X in The Last Stand should have created a huge emotional punch, but the real loss was the moment when Wolverine had to stab Jean Grey in order to prevent the Phoenix from ruining the entire world. (Janssen recently pointed out that many of her most famous roles ended with her characters getting bumped off.) And, truly, it's in this tragedy that the ethos of The Last Stand lives; Jean Grey is just too powerful to be left alive, and so, the quasi-immortal Wolverine becomes the last X-man standing.
X-Men: The Last Stand.
And yet, as a loose adaptation of the famous (infamous?) “Dark Phoenix Saga” storyline from 1980, The Last Stand is actually more rewatchable than the 2019 film X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which, although a bit more faithful to the comics, is way more incoherent and bizarrely even more downbeat than The Last Stand. It’s also arguable that The Last Stand is a better watch than X-Men: Apocalypse, and you could even make an argument that it's less busy than Days of Future Past.
The Last Stand also creates, quite literally, the entire arc for Jackman’s Wolverine in The Wolverine (2013), Days of Future Past (2014), and Logan (2017). In short, no matter which continuity is the real one (lots of overlapping and contradictory X-Men stories in just a few short years between 2013 and 2019), all roads lead to Logan being depressed because Jean Grey was fatally stabbed (by Logan) in The Last Stand.
So, even if The Last Stand is not remotely good, it has two things that most other bad X-Men movies don’t have, or don’t have enough of: First, the stakes do feel extremely high throughout this film, regardless of how muddled the Phoenix plot gets. Second, The Last Stand gets points for being consequential, sort of like the Star Trek Nemesis of the X-Men franchise. It may not have been a great entry, but the events of this movie — at least when it came to Jean Grey and Logan — stuck around in the collective mutant consciousness for a very long time.
