X-Men: The Last Stand -- standing very tall

Sometimes it doesn't pay to pay too much attention to reviewers. Tonight I saw X-Men: The Last Stand, against the advice of all my favorite reviewers, all of whom hated it, and against the advice of my son, who found it a great disappointment.

I'm sorry they were disappointed; I had a great time. It's not great, serious cinema, it's a cartoon, and while it didn't spend a lot of time pondering the issues it raised, that was OK, because that made it that much more fun to dissect it with my movie-partner after the show.

There are lots of explosions, if you are a fan of them. I was pleased to (finally) see a female mutant with kick-ass powers. I can live without explosions, but if you are gonna have them, by all means, make sure that they are equal-opportunity explosions.

Yes, there were lots of new mutants, and I couldn't keep them straight. So what? Wolverine did his stuff, and Storm did her stuff, and The Phoenix did HER stuff, and Magneto was evil-but-poignantly-so, and Mystique did her stuff (oh, did she ever! but you will have to see the movie to learn the rest of THAT) and a fine time was had by all -- or at least, by me. I could have done with a bit more of Rogue's existential crisis, but hey, most of the audience, myself included, could chat and speculate about that later, which is probably more fun anyway than seeing only one version of it played out on screen.

I am not generally an F-X fan, but there is one bit in this movie, something involving a famous piece of engineering, that was downright breathtaking.

So yeah, I give it a thumb's up, way up. Don't believe everything you read.