I went to see X-Men 3 last night and I still can't get over how truly awful the film was. There were two things decent and watchable: The special effects weren't bad. Most amazing, given the dreck for dialogue, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and Kelsey Grammar all manage to turn in decent performances. I guess that's the power of a true actor. The same can't be said for Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry who both milked their awful dialogue for all the bad acting it was worth.
I wasn't even expecting a good movie, I understood that it had a hack director (of Rush Hour "fame") and a hack writer (of the just barely tolerable as an action film but awful in writing, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but I was absolutely shocked oat how much they shat upon all of things that make X-Men great. Instead of telling a single decent story they appear to have sat down to tell as many stories as poorly as possible. (Bringing in as many X-Men characters as they could think of, solely to stupidly discard and destroy them.) They removed the subtlety and the characterization. They took the bad Rush Hour approach of every action sequence ending in a stupid punchline. They threw logic and dialogue out the window. It wasn't even a decent action film! The cinematographer seems to have come straight from the world of Hispanic Soap Operas, attempting to fake intimacy with the characters with extreme close up shots. Just about every shot was too close. Unfortunately you really can't fake decent action or decent characterization by shooting bad action up close.