Madrox is exactly the type of character who should show up for a bit part in an X-Men movie, a guy with a cool power and name recognition, but who doesn’t have a Wolverine or Storm-level fan base to justify an A-plot. The Last Stand gives Madrox two scenes, and allows Dane exactly one line in each of them. And the Grey’s Anatomy star nails it.
The first is Madrox’s introduction, when Magneto rescues Mystique from a truck carrying kidnapped mutants. Before freeing Juggernaut, a great X-Men character who gets totally mishandled by the movie and is miscast as Vinnie Jones, Magneto opens a door and out walks seven Madrox duplicates. “I can use a man of your talents,” sneers Magneto, to which Multiple Man shrugs, “I’m in.”
Even better is the second scene, which mostly stays in the perspective of the war room operated by mutant hunting military man Bolivar Trask (played here by Bill Duke, and played by Peter Dinklage in X-Men: Days of Future Past, because this franchise is nuts). Through infrared satellite images, we see Trask’s soldiers descending upon a secret camp filled with mutants. But as the soldiers get closer, the people all disappear, leaving one behind. We cut to the camp, where we see that everyone there was a Multiple Man duplicate, all of whom reabsorb into Madrox Prime.
“Okay,” he says with a snarky grin and his hands raised. “I give up!”
Everything about Madrox in that scene feels like it came right out of a Peter David comic. It’s not just his costuming, the green and yellow shirt peaking out from under a leather jacket. It’s the absolutely smug way Dane delivers the line, the grin that would make you absolutely hate him if he wasn’t so darn handsome.
Nearly every other character in The Last Stand strays far from their comic book roots. Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine as a soft-hearted romantic, while Famke Janssen’s Phoenix is a generic 2000s horror monster. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen have enough presence to make even poorly-written Professor X and Magneto work, but nearly everyone who isn’t Kelsey Grammer as Beast acts nothing like the mutants we know from the pages of Marvel.
