Ratner ruins ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’

The script by Simon Kinberg (“Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) and Zak Penn (“Fantastic Four”) tends to vulgarize the characters from the first films, while barely establishing the personalities and motivations of the new additions. (Singer took his “X2” writers, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, to work with him on “Superman Returns.”)

Especially disappointing is Angel, who has been heavily promoted as the main attraction in “Last Stand,” though he has only a few scenes. Foster plays him as an adult, who chooses to reject the mutant cure and uses his wings to fly across San Francisco Bay. But Cayden Boyd, cast as the child Angel, is more effective in a childhood flashback in which he tries to cut off his wings to please his conforming father (Michael Murphy).

Grammer doesn’t raise as many expectations, but he’s remarkably colorless, and the same goes for the rest of the newbies. Josef Sommer doesn’t go far with his role as the mildly demagogic American President, who makes the mutants sound like homegrown terrorists, and there’s even less for Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) to do as a worried doctor.

Working with a $165 million budget (“X2” cost $110 million), Ratner uses more money to make a lesser film. The overkill of the final scenes, which include Magneto’s transformation of the Golden Gate Bridge into a bridge to Alcatraz, is typical of his spectacle-over-people approach.

“Sometimes you forget when you’re juggling so many characters,” says Singer on the DVD commentary track for “X2.” “They’re all crossing each other’s paths and you’re trying to establish them and make them interesting, humorous, but most importantly believable.’’

He could be offering a critique of “The Last Stand,” which leaves you with little interest in following the franchise further. Aside from killing off several key characters (presumably for good, though Jean’s resurrection makes you wonder) and introducing new mutants who make little impression, Ratner fails at maintaining our interest in the characters who do survive. What has happened to Rogue, who was so vital in the earlier films, and the shape-shifting Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), whose self-transformations were once so clever?

Also on the “X2” commentary track, Singer illustrates specifically how he emphasized believability rather than technology in a scene in which Iceman leaves his parents and brother for the family of mutants: “Instead of having the jet take off and spending the money on that, we just played it in a close-up on [Iceman]. You get more emotion out of it and save about $100,000.”

As a result, Iceman’s separation from his family is one of the most moving moments in the “X-Men” series, and — as Singer points out — one of the most practical on financial basis. You won’t find its equal in “The Last Stand.”

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