A solid effort by director Bryan Singer. Not a great film by any means, but one that stays faithful to its source material. Patrick Stewart leads a band of super powered genetic mutants against Holocaust survivor Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), bent on inadvertent genocide. We meet plenty of other mutants; some good others bad. There’s some big action sequences and some big talk about racism and bigotry. It ends on an “up” sequel-ready note. You forget it all two hours later.
Just like the comic book.
Actually, I grew up reading X-Men comics. And if I had been 14 or 15, I would have probably loved this movie. But, at 32 it seems a bit silly to me. There’s some fun action stuff and the film’s producers certainly knew the material well enough to mess with it a little. Hugh Jackman plays Logan/Wolverine, the film’s main protagonist. A Bogart-like character, Logan must be convinced to join the fight. Through him we meet the other X-Men as well as the Brotherhood gang (probably the coolest aspect of this film). Jackman’s good, but a bit too cuddly for my taste. I like my Wolverine mean and nasty, but I guess a psychotic lead character would be hard to swallow. Overall, I’d say Jackman carries the film well. Everybody else also does a fine job too, especially Stewart and Femke Jennsen as Jean Grey. (I don’t know who I’m in love with more Jean or Femke?) That’s the film’s main success: making these guys seem human. That so often gets lost in comic book adaptations. Singer does some good work with his actors here, but he is sabotaged by his editing. I heard that almost forty minutes of the original cut have been edited out after a preview screening. That certainly explains why X-Men is so choppy and disjointed.
But please don’t expect too much. Maybe X-Men II will be better.
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