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| Movies,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F4
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Absolutely typical of my current off-kilter prediction making – I labelled this a dog two months previously (as I did the ‘Shaft’ remake which is apparently now a full-on winner), and now I’m forced to eat my words, ALL OF MY WORDS. Pre-release anti-hype has been digging at the dodgy promo shots and the on-set anxiety between director Brian Singer and shaky Fox executives. Then they started pushing the trailers, a lot of trailers, and I was getting more and more impressed. Last week I finally caught the film itself, in a less than plush multiplex way out on the Boston highway in Revere, home of the steel pole.
First off, I think we’ve been poisoned by piss-poor superhero franchises recently, ‘Batman and Robin’ being the straw that broke the camel’s arse for sure. The X-Men is the last shot for studio’s being able to cobble a decent Burger-King franchise together – if it hits hard enough, then we will finally see a new Superman film as well as the long-overdue Spiderman movie. So good news for nerds then, because this film is FINE, it’s OK - it’s actually not a piece of BS.
It’s no epic – it’s just a well-structured, craftily written romp through the origin of the X-Men. It appeals both to fans of the comic and newcomers by not getting too bogged down in the hyper-complex backstory of the X-Men comic and at the same time respecting the original material by not treating it in over-camp fashion, and giving it an easy going low key approach.
It’s an unusually short film, cracking it all off in just over ninety minutes. You get the basic set up of a minutes into the future world where certain folks have evolved into higher forms, giving them special powers. There’s a slight meditation on the nature of prejudice, as the powers that be decide to crack down on the new strain of humanity, forcing the mutants to split into two factions– for and against humanity, and this split become the crux of the film as the good mutants square off against the bad mutants. It’s all a bit ‘silly’ – purely because the situation seems so ridiculous. The dialogue is stretched to the edge of credibility, with classy (!!) English actors Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen bravely fighting against lines of dialogue that would sink any lesser actors. But it’s credit to them that the film holds together, and also where a sloppier blockbuster production would just crack through the scenes to bigger and bigger set-pieces, this feels more like something driven by a plot. If anything suffers, it’s some of the junior X-men themselves, with so many characters to introduce, it’s inevitable that some will get short shrift. Where Wolverine and Rogue (who get the main focus) drive the emotional core of the film, X-Men favourites like Cyclops and Storm come out like cardboard cut-outs. The bad-guys come off even worse, with only Mystique (a shape changing blue foxy babe) getting claps from the audience.
Nevertheless, this is superior to any other kid’s blockbuster stuff, and for once it’s a film that I can actually recount the day after I saw it. Even if the franchise does descend into poor soulless sequels and bargain bin unsold toys, I’ll still look back as this first film as something that came out in the summer that for once didn’t disappoint the hell out of me.
UK rating:
12
US rating:
PG
Bryan Singer 2000 USA
Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, James Marsden, Famke Janssen.
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