REVIEWED - X-MEN: THE LAST STAND LET NOBODY suggest the X-Men films are not about anything. The original Marvel comic, which saw two powerful mutants react to their exclusion from society in sharply contrasting fashions, was often seen as an allegory for the dispute between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. By the time the second of Bryan Singer's two film episodes emerged all American art was required by law to say something about the War on Terror. X2 obliged in responsible, if slightly ponderous, fashion, writes Donald Clarke

Now, Singer having jumped ship for Superman Returns, Brett Ratner, the journeyman behind Rush Hour and Red Dragon, has been drafted in to expand the franchise's concerns further. The Last Stand, which finds Magneto and Professor Xavier divided over an emerging "cure" for the mutant condition, manages to allude to gay rights issues, the perils of identity politics and the motives and methods of Osama bin Laden. Whether it actually says anything about those matters is another question entirely. Along the way, the picture loses the run of itself completely. The pressure to accommodate all these metaphors, allegories and quotations is more than the flimsy story can bear. The picture is - if you follow my reasoning - about everything except what it's actually about.

The antidote to the condition which permits the kindly Xavier (Patrick Stewart) to read minds and the malevolent Magneto (Ian McKellen) to manipulate metal is being developed on a research facility on Alcatraz island. Neither of the mutant community's two senior figures - whose camp bickering increasingly suggests Evadne Hinge and Hilda Brackett - is particularly happy about this development, but it is, inevitably, Magneto who uses the controversy to launch a violent counter-response. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), not quite as dead as events in X2 suggested, rises from her watery resting place in a bad enough mood to join forces with the insurrectionists. Hank McCoy, a hairy, blue politician played by the game Kelsey Grammer, seeks to smooth turbulent waters.

After an endless amount of confused babble and the occasional half-decent joke - Magneto's taped message to the world reminds us of Osama's - the various opposing forces are brought together in a mighty conflagration in the Bay Area. Sadly, the action is engineered with insufficient gusto to compensate for the sluggishness of what has come before. Neither coherent enough to be read as a meaningful political commentary nor sufficiently lively to work as a popcorn flick, The Last Stand closes the trilogy with an unsatisfactory splat.

Or does it? Sit through the credits and you will encounter an epilogue that suggests there may, after all, be more to come. Nothing that makes money stays dead for long in this world.