The good news about X-Men: The Last Stand is that it's the best Brett Ratner film yet. The bad news: It's still a Brett Ratner film.

It has all the marking of "The Rat," including an overreliance on close-ups, incomprehensible action, and an indifference to characters that can only come from a director who admires the work of Chris Tucker. Whereas Bryan Singer carefully crafted the first two installments into minor gems, despite severe roadblocks (a meager budget and Halle Berry, most notably), Ratner's vision is all about delivering choice trailer moments without coughing up a decent product once the tickets have been sold. Singer's X-Men had soul; Ratner's is all surface.

And it's not even quality surface. Much of The Last Stand is muddy to look at, with colors—always one of Singer's strong suits—washed pale, and camera angles—never one of Ratner's strong suits—lazily chosen and uninspired. As a director, Ratner belongs on TV, where his shots would find a proper fit—he's unable, or unwilling, to explore the frame fully. At one point Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) arrive outside a home only to be confronted as if by magic by Magneto (Ian McKellen), who is mere steps from the door. We're left to assume that either the X-Men are blind or Magneto has somehow materialized out of thin air.

Things only get worse during the film's brief pauses to muddle through the plot, most of which involve the creation of a mutant "cure" by a wealthy father whose son sprouted wings before puberty. A creepy bald-headed boy is somehow involved, as is Jean Grey (Famke Janssen)—who's been resurrected, after being left at the bottom of a lake in the previous film, as the internally conflicted and all-powerful Phoenix. Neither is satisfactorily explored: Ratner and his screenwriters are obviously far too excited to get to the film's major set pieces.

Said set pieces are suitably grand, I suppose, but there's nothing graceful about them. Say what you want about Singer as a director (and based on the previews for Superman Returns, we'll soon be saying a lot), but the man knows how to pace and cut together a proper action scene. In The Last Stand, however, simple master shots seem to have been left off the shot list, making every clash between mutants and humans (and eventually mutants and mutants) a blur of deadening mayhem. Yes, Wolverine gets to kick some minor ass, and thankfully Storm isn't entirely useless this time around, but to what end? If a mutant with amazing powers can't... you know, amaze, then why should we bother to care?

The answer, in the case of The Last Stand, is that we don't. Just two moments in the film really stand out: one involving a porcupine mutant who kills by way of a hug, the other a mad dash across Alcatraz Island between Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones). Both moments are far too brief to rescue the film, especially when there's not much story-wise to back them up.

The world created for the X-Men, both on page and on the screen, is one of conflicts internal and external, where ethics are made slippery and moral ambiguities explored. The screenplay touches upon this trait briefly—the mutant cure, for example, is an opt-in procedure (at least initially)—but, like every intriguing idea in the film, the conflict is quickly abandoned in favor of the big summer tent-pole boom. The X-Men films have never lived up to the intelligence of the original comics, but they've never shied away—or completely ignored—that intelligence either. X-Men: The Last Stand, under Ratner's abysmal care, is too scared to tackle the big ideas. He has given us the summer blockbuster he wants to see—unfortunately, most everyone who enjoys movies has better taste. It's a shameful way for the trilogy to end: not with a brain, but with a whimper.

brad@thestranger.com