The usual tedious superhero blockbuster for humorless, fun-hating fanboys

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2006)

Fanboys have no sense of fun. It's partly their influence that makes these superhero tales increasingly self-important and witless. If you flip through comic books today, you'll find they tackle issues such as drug addiction, street crime, racial bigotry and homosexuality, all while muscle-bound louts in circus costumes are flying around and shooting laser beams out of their fists. And no one fights crime any more; they just wrestle with their own demons. I recently scanned a comic book where an old Superman and a young Superman were throwing trucks and boulders at each other as they screamed pop-psych jargon about their grievances in what seemed like an apocalyptic episode of "Dr. Phil."
This movie opens with a scene in a Nazi concentration camp—yes, a superhero movie with a realistic Nazi concentration camp—where we meet the villain Magneto as a boy, who discovers his ability to move metal with his mind. Once we're in the present (or the "near-future"), we see the U.S. Senate debating on whether mutants like Magneto should be exposed and listed on a public register. It's like the yellow stars and number-tattoos Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Get it? I don't. How is a fear of Jews parallel to a fear of people who can walk through walls, shoot fire out of their eyes or control the weather with their minds? In this movie the earnest idealists are against the mutant registry and the snooty hypocrites are in favor of it. Frankly I'm with the snooty hypocrites. What would we do if there were real super-powered mutants among us? Thanks to the fanboys' thirst for "realism" even in comic book adventures, the issues of Wolverine and his ilk are made to seem like urgent social problems.
Fanboys have no sense of humor either. A sense of humor is not the ability to laugh at everything, but knowing when something is funny and when it isn't. Fanboys have nerd-humor. Nerd-humor comes from the desire to condescend to the very thing that one takes deeply seriously. It comes out in this movie when Logan (later to be Wolverine) mocks silly superhero names like Cyclops and Storm. "What's your name," he says to Professor Xavier, who uses a wheelchair, "Wheels?" This sounds like the movie spoofing itself, but it isn't. It's the movie congratulating itself for being aware of its own absurdities; and once it acknowledges them, it can dismiss them and take itself all the more seriously. This is in contrast to the 1960s TV show "Batman," which really was a spoof. But a fanboy doesn't get it, not even if you tell him the joke. "Yeah, I know it's a spoof, but what kind of Batman has a pot belly?"
Marvel Comics used to have a jaunty sense of fun, but that's the company that introduced social relevance and superheroes who have everyday problems just like us. The DC Comics concept of heroes that are larger than life is dead and now even Batman and Superman have "issues." This opinion will guarantee me 0 of 564 useful votes, but I think the ultimate superhero show is the wonderfully ludicrous cartoon series "Challenge of the SuperFriends" (now on DVD). It's funny, fast-paced and entertaining in a way that a movie like this never could be.
"X-Men" (the word "the" was dropped so that no one would give up on the title before he finished reading it) offers the usual fare for fans of fantasy blockbusters: great old actors (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan) spouting nonsense; younger actors delivering dismal wisecracks ("You're a dick!"); rapid cutting so that we're unable to savor a performance or believe that an actor is making more than one move at a time during a fight sequence; CGI out the wazoo; grand-looking sets and fabulous sound design for those who want their junk to look and sound good; and overblown music.
Obviously I don't like the movie, but it could have been far worse. I watched the whole thing; whereas I shut off "The Fantastic Four" ("The Fantastic 4"? "Fntstc 4"?) after 30 minutes. And I was amazed how compelling and subtle Anna Paquin could be in a sea of SFX. I kept wishing she and Hugh Jackman would steal away from the freak show, sit down at a coffee shop and just talk for 90 minutes.