Magneto's the Good Guy! (X-Men 3)

The really like Mike LaSalle's review of X3 in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here are the best parts:

The pretensions take the form of the central metaphor that compares mutants to people of extraordinary, groundbreaking talent. That metaphor is bogus.
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The metaphor here is the clash between special talent (the mutants) and conformity (everybody else). But it's one thing for people to react with hostility toward someone who writes an incendiary novel. It's quite another for people to react in this way toward someone who can set their heads on fire. The first reaction is intolerance. The second is simply the genuine recognition of a threat and the beginning of self-preservation. The vision at the heart of "X-Men" -- of a golden Utopia in which humans live side by side with mutants -- is absurd. It requires that mutants never get mad, ever, and that humans never even have to worry that they might. But hasn't anybody ever heard of road rage?
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The existence of the cure upends an already shaky societal balance. Some mutants want the cure, mutant activists protest the cure, and the militant mutant, Magneto (McKellen) wants to start a war over it, seeing this as the beginning of his people's destruction. Xavier, the saintly founder of the X-Men, thinks all this intolerance is unnecessary, but if you actually stand back and examine the situation (which the movie never does), it's clear that Magneto and the anti-mutant extremists are right. After all, if Xavier's moderate course is right, why, after three movies, are there less than 10 X-Men? Obviously, his dream is not where the future is heading.

LK invited me to see it Friday night to see it w/ some buds, but couldn't make it for various considerations. If I'm lucky, this will be a DVD rental. If I'm unlucky, I'll catch it at 2AM on cable in a few years.