Preamble
Yes, I'm out of my element...so sue me. :)
What It's About
The X-Men are a group of men and women who happen to be mutants. They were born with special abilities like being able to freeze things, manipulate fire, and transport themselves through solid entities. Because mutants are different from humans in that way, there is a certain fear of having them around. Gasp!
When a random, terrorist mutant, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), enters the White House and tries to kill the President, the government, and more specifically a scientist General Stryker (Brian Cox) wants to get this mutant thing under control.
First things first. Stryker decides that they must send in an emergency SWAT team to a school for mutant children so that they can get to the bottom of what plots the mutants are scheming to execute. The school, founded by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), is also home to the X-Men - Storm (Halle Berry), Cyclops (James Marsden), and Jean (Famke Janssen).
When the strike occurs, X-Men Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has just recently returned to the fold in search of some more clues to his background. While Jean and Storm are out looking for the terrorist mutant and Xavier and Cyclops are out visiting imprisoned mutant Magento (Ian McKellen), Wolverine is left to defend the school against the covert operatives.
Those who escape include Wolverine, and students Rogue (Anna Paquin), Pyro (Aaron Stanford), and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore).
Through a series of events, the group becomes clued into a master plan. Someone is out to rid the universe of mutants. Will they stop them in time? Will they find out who is behind the plan?
What I Thought
A couple of things for you to know...
1. I never saw the first X-Men movie.
2. I never read any of the X-Men comic books.
With those two things out in the open, I know I'm not alone. When a movie studio is intent on making a blockbuster hit, one of the things that they have to be careful about is not alienating any potential-new audience members.
As a person who falls into that category, I felt like the movie didn't live up to its hype.
I place the majority of the blame on writer/director, Bryan Singer. While the plot had good intentions, he seemed to be intent on centering the focus of the movie on all of the special effects. There could have been key moments in the film where he captured some of the emotion of the audience and sucked them in for the ride. Nope. He missed it. I'm a little angry because I saw hints of me caring about the plot and the characters.
For example, there is a scene where Wolverine meets up with Jean. You can tell that there is history there. You can tell that there's love and lust there. Doing something right then and there to hook us in would have gone a long way in getting me to care about the rest of the movie AND care if the characters got out of their predicament.
When Mr. Singer wasn't busy blowing things up, transporting people from one room to another, or engaging in battles, he was focusing squarely on setting up the next X-Men (the third movie). I won't give anything specific away but know that you knew exactly what was going to happen to set up the third movie way before it happened. By the way, I also knew what character was going to not return. That took me all of a few minutes. I've heard of good foreshadowing in a movie but Mr. Singer went just a bit overboard. Maybe he doesn't think that his audience has a brain???
The message of tolerance of one another - that I believe Mr. Singer was trying to get across - was completely lost until the end, when he decided to create a soap-opera-ish type moment in order to get that final audience approval. Didn't work for me.
Before you yell at me and tell me that I need to be a fan of the Marvel comic - or - that I needed to see the first movie in order to have an appreciation for this one...know that I've had no trouble enjoying movies that are out of my league. It's not me :).
I want to go just a tad bit easier on the actors because I really do think that Mr. Singer put them at a disadvantage.
I like Halle Berry and maybe I'm missing something... I don't know how her character in the comic book behaves but here, she seemed to be a pretty one-dimensional character. We did get to see glimpses of something dark, especially when she conversed with Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) but none of that was explored beyond those few minutes.
I thought that Hugh Jackman was a total hottie in some of his other movies. Here, he's not a hottie but that's okay. My problem was that he didn't seem to find the spirit of his character until towards the end. By that time, I just wanted the movie to be over with.
Patrick Stewart who I simply adore, was totally wasted in this role. He was even more one-dimensional than Halle Berry.
The acting stand-outs were Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming. Both had extremely electric screen presence and maybe if more time was centered around them, it might have saved the movie for me.
I must say that I like Anna Paquin in just about anything that she's in and because she has signed on for the third movie, I just might see it based upon her participation.
The End
Yell at me if you want. I'm disappointed that the director and the studio didn't care enough about me - the regular, movie-going public - to make a decent enough blockbuster. I wanted my Summer movie experience started off with a bang. All I got was a limp whimper.
Following a shocking attack on the President, the X-Men must stand united with their deadliest enemies to combat a menace that threatens every mutant ...More at Buy.com
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