Flash forward to the present. Storm (Berry) and Wolverine (Jackman) are in the midst of a fiery battle against an unseen enemy. Fighting beside them are their young charges, Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore), or Iceman; his girlfriend, Rogue (Paquin); and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who can morph through solid objects. Colossus, the adamantium-skinned he-man, picks Wolverine up and hurls him at the giant that is attacking them (a Sentinel?), knocking its head off.

End program. The teachers have actually been training the students in the holographic Danger Room at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.

Upstairs, Scott Summers (James Marsden), otherwise known as Cyclops, is still mourning the loss of Jean Grey (Janssen) in Alkali Lake. But he hears her voice in his head. Riding his motorcycle back to Alkali Lake, he makes a startling discovery.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Josef Sommer) has called his new secretary of mutant affairs, the blue-furred intellectual Henry "Hank" McCoy (Grammer), to a meeting. It seems that Worthington Labs has developed a new drug: a "cure" for mutancy, which can counteract the effects of the X gene. Permanently.

At Worthington's top-secret facility on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, chief executive Warren Worthington II (Michael Murphy) announces the cure. Unknown to the press, however, Worthington's own son (Ben Foster) is a mutant: An angelic man with huge white wings.

McCoy consults with Xavier and the X-Men about the cure, which Rogue is eager to take, but Storm and Wolverine regard it as a threat. But at a secret meeting of disgruntled mutants, the fugitive Magneto has a different agenda. Join me, my brothers, he says, and we will rid the world of the scourge of humankind and take our rightful place at the top of the evolutionary chain. If they want a war, we'll give them a war.

A movie that's a troubling mutation

The third—and, by the look of it, the last—X-Men movie mutates from the previous two excellent films. Stepping in for Bryan Singer, who created the first two films but left to direct Superman Returns, is Rush Hour's Ratner. And replacing writers David Hayter, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris is Kinberg of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, joining X2 veteran Zak Penn. This mutation isn't good. This last installment has the requisite action, visual effects and thrills but lacks the heart, soul and much of the resonance of the previous two films.

Singer's X-Men movies had clarity and subtlety: They layered complex themes of alienation, discrimination and humanity into rich stories with conflicted characters, multiple points of view and sly humor. By contrast, Ratner and crew draw in broad strokes of black and white with characters that are two-dimensional at best, declaiming their points of view like slogans and delivering punchlines that often fall flat. The movie is obvious, inelegant and operatic in the way of the worst comic books, all primary colors, sharp lines and no shades of gray. Or Grey.

At the same time, Ratner and his writers seem to lack a firm grasp on their central metaphor. They say that humans have devised a cure for mutancy, then pose a question: Is it good or bad? But they fail utterly to develop the matter in a way that makes much sense, choosing instead simply to pit mutants against each other. Storm argues strenuously against the need for a cure, yet leads the charge at the end to protect it at all costs. Wolverine doesn't like the idea of a cure, but comes up with the idea to deploy it against other mutants. Why does that make them the good guys?

X-Men: The Last Stand also fails to integrate its many characters well into the story, with several fading into the background until deployed to move the plot along.

The Jean Grey/Phoenix storyline in particular doesn't mesh well with the main story. In the end, Janssen spends a lot of time simply standing around until called upon by the story to provide visual effects.

Indeed, much of the movie feels gratuitous, as if the filmmakers had an idea for a great action sequence and tortured the storyline to accommodate it, rather than tailoring the action to fit the story and characters. Want a big scene on the Golden Gate Bridge? Put the bad scientists on Alcatraz island and forget that boats exist.