I first saw this movie in high school as part of a Liturature through Films class. The teacher figured that after all the serious adaptions we had looked at, she might as well choose something fun (for us, not for her). I was not impressed, but seeing a widescreen action film in pan and scan over the course of five days is not the optimum veiwing experince. I had also heard that the studio cut out about forty minuets from Singer' director's cut. I wanted to watch somethign breezy and light, and figured that I might as well give it another chance.
Before I continue with the review, I feel I must go into a neccessary aside about my history with comics. I am not enough of a snob to argue that I am "above" comics, or that the medium is inherntly flawed. I love reading Superman and Donald Duck comics when I kid. But now that I am older, I have to say that I don't have much enthusiusam for the format anymore. A while ago, while cleaning my room at home I found my old stash of comics in a drawer. The happy memories of many afternoons spent enthralled in the stories as a kid were dashed as I noticed the storys in book after treasured book simply consisted of elaborate ways to get the characters to fight each other. When they did attempt psychogical realism, it just came off as rediclous. I can remember being really shook up as a kid when I saw on the magazine rack that Superman had died. Re-reading the same story,was stuck at how perfunctory the death was. Did anybody REALLY think he was dead? Since I have been in college I have read comics written by my friends and classmates. I also read an excellent series of graphic novels called A Treasury of Victorian Murder, which proved to me that yes, comics can indeed be an art form. It's just that so much of it is commercial junk about people shooting lasers out of their eyes at each other or the Joker escaping from the mental institution for the nine millionth time or whatever.
The point of this walk down memory lane is that my main problem with comics is my main problem with X-Men. Bryan Singer is trying to tell an essentially rediclous story serouisly. At one point he has Hugh Jackman as Wolverine make a joke about it, but it's kidding on the square. There is so much plot that he can never get us to care about the characters, even the ones that could be interesting, like the villain, Magneto (Ian McKellan). The movie's attempts at characterzation makes it worse than if they hadn't tried. A character is given a psycholical trait- Wolverine is a troubled loner with a heart of gold, Cyclops (James Marsden) is a smartass, their leader, Captain Picard-oh excuse me, Dr. X (Patrick Stewart) is a father figure and so on. The movie gets really uninteresting as we watch grown adults with names like Storm and Rogue get into conversations about their lonley childhood or how Cyclops loves somebody that Wolverine likes and blah blah blah. The promised cut scenes don't help at all- just more of the same. Even worse, the dialouge is incredibly cliched, I was able to guess many of the lines before they were spoken and got them exactly right.
I realize that some might argue that I'm expecting too much from an action movie, but it doesn't even work on that level. The visual effects look fake, even after just six years, and the action sequences are not very exciting, since you don't care about what happens (it's not like thier going to kill off anyone important in the first movie anyway).
To make a good superhero movie, I now realize, you must end any attempt at realism. The best superhero movie ever made and the genre's only masterpiece, Superman (1978, Richard Donnor), creates a fantasy world where we can beleive that a man in tights really can be a great, all-American hero. The excellent Daredevil (2003, Mark Steven Johnson), one of the few others in this genre I liked, also worked because I bought the neo-noir world the character was in. The world of X-Men is a lot like ours, except it's more shallow. The reason why Dr. X can read everyone's mind could because not much is there.
X-Men (2000)