X-Men: The Last Highlander

Forgive me for writing this so late… Since Little Quip came into the world, I have only seen a couple of movies in the theater. I’m not the kind of guy that can easily ignore the disgruntled groans of my fellow movie-goers as my child cries or complains and I blissfully ignore him in favor of the big screen action. One of these days he may get to experience a first-run film, but I will settle for DVDs until that day. I also get to catch the occasional flick on a plane flight, which brings me to my current post.

While flying to Wyoming the other day, I was able to catch X-Men: The Last Stand. It was a decent flick, but may be one of the more inappropriately titled movies ever. Here are my two issues…

First, how can you get stabbed with several darts full of the “No Longer A Mutant” serum, and still have powers? Second, how can you have a movie subtitled “The Last Stand”, imply at the end that all is well and everyone is going to get along, and then blatantly leave the door open for a sequel? The least they could have done is put a question mark on the movie posters.

I realize this is all just formulaic Hollywood nonsense. They have to leave room in every action flick for a sequel just in case it’s a hit. If you tidy things up nicely at the end, and the movie kicks ass, it’s hard to make a sequel that isn’t completely laughable in its attempt to justify itself.

My favorite example of this concept going terribly wrong is Highlander, Highlander II: The Quickening, and Highlander III: The Final Dimension. They spent five years trying to figure out how to make “There can be only one” mean “There can be only one until more aliens come to earth and then there can be more than one until there is only one again” and finally ended up with “There never really was only one because there was this one guy who got locked in a cave so at best there were two and we’re not even going to try to address the whole alien angle in this movie because even we realize how stupid that was.”

There have been other examples like the Friday the 13th franchise and the Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise, but even they don’t come close to the ridiculousness of the Highlander series.

Anyway, I digress. My point is this, and I hope someone in Hollywood is listening, rather than spending years trying to come up with some bizarre explanation for why “The End” never actually means “The End”, why not invest that time and energy in creating new concepts? I realize it may be hard to think up new stories, but it can’t be any harder than trying to figure out ways to get out of the box you created.

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