The Hindu Business Line : X-Men: The Last Stand: Fight a different battle

Perhaps it is not for nothing that people like comic books. When blood and sweat get trashed on the stock market, it pays to stay invested in a theme beyond life as a human.

`X-Men: The Last Stand' is perfect for lives lost on the hazy road to fortune. Gain through the ceiling one day, crash a thousand points the next, if there is one way around confusion as thick as concrete, it has to be mutation.

Change the weather like Storm, bulldoze like Juggernaut or borrow Mystique's powers and be Warren Buffet.

All in your head of course, which is the relief comic books offer, there is no limit to what you can be in your imagination even if the world is as ravaged as today's Dalal Street.

The X-Men series talks of a population that is mutating to evolve, a mix of human beings and mutants edging towards confrontation.

`X-Men: The Last Stand' is the third in the `X-Men' series, a trilogy the studio gives the impression of having concluded though Magneto still had faint traces of mutant power when lights returned at the theatre. Nothing attracts the good more than the persistence of evil. The studio's take: A `cure' for mutation threatens to alter the course of history.

For the first time, mutants have a choice - retain their uniqueness though it isolates and alienates them, or give up their powers to fit in.

The opposing viewpoints of mutant leaders Charles Xavier, who preaches tolerance, and Eric Lehnsherr or Magneto, who believes in survival of the fittest, are put to the ultimate test - triggering the war to end all wars.

There is enough mayhem in the film to make a 1000-point meltdown look like chicken feed. But for all its action, special effects and the utterly fictitious premise of its characters, the story wraps up the trilogy well save the last few minutes of Jean and Wolverine.

For the record, Jean, believed to have succumbed to dam waters in the second film, returns in the third but the overall balancing of accounts entails loss of mutant power and even demise to some other characters.

On the whole, one of the better thought and better anchored films based on comic book heroes.

Ian McKellan as Magneto and Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier anchor the film, Hugh Jackman provides memorable continuity as the solitary Wolverine. X-Men: The Last Stand releases here on May 26. Watch it, accept it and fight a surrogate battle in your head. Let that battered market convalesce in a few days.Just one question - why do they call it X-Men, when half the team, including the most powerful mutant, is woman?