There’s a special place in my heart for comic book movies. With the right director, they can take an otherwise outrageous comic and turn it into something that makes you think, “Yeah, I can buy into that.” Sam Raimi’s doing it with the Spiderman movies, and Bryan Singer did it with the first two X-Men. Fear set in when Singer stepped aside to put new life into the Superman franchise, and Brett Ratner (Rush Hour 1 & 2, The Family Man) took over the helm. Visions of Joel Schumacher ruining Tim Burton’s Batman movies started dancing in my head.
The movie starts off innocently enough with a flashback to “10 Years Ago” with Magneto and Professor X (they were still friends) going to pick up a mid-late teenage Jean Grey to bring to the Prof’s school in upstate New York.
The movie then cuts to “5 Years Ago” with another mid-late teenage mutant, Warren Washington III, known in the comic book world as Angel, and later Archangel, trying to saw off his angelic wings.
Finally it cuts to “The Not So Distance Future” where we are thrown into the middle of a firefight where Storm and Wolverine are leading the young mutants, Colossus, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, and Rogue, as they try to defend themselves against an attack by a Sentinal. This is a really cool scene because it gives the audience an opportunity to see what all the mutants have to offer. We later find out that X-Men were merely in a holographic simulation (similar to the Holodeck in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”).
Later, we are introduced to Dr. Hank McCoy (Beast), the U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs. He is covered in blue skin and hair. The filmmakers cast Kelsey Grammer for the role which could be considered the best casting job since getting Patrick Stewart to play the Prof.
If it feels like I’m jumping around is because the movie didn’t have the flow like the Singer-directed ones did. It seemed like Ratner wanted to jump you straight into the action without giving anytime to trying to flesh out the newer characters that were introduced.
Having Beast in the movie was great, but you never got a feel of who he was or what his true involvement with Xavier was. I would have liked to seen a little more of Angel. I didn’t know who most of the mutants were in Magneto’s “Brotherhood of Mutants.”
Too sum up the movie, it was “less talky and more fighty.” Sometimes a little “talky” does work.
As a side note, this movie is rated PG-13 for a reason. Be very wary of taking little junior to see this because there are some very disturbing images.