They're here, they're queer, get used to it

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2000)

It's the most dazzling Unconscious Subversive Moment of recent times. A right-wing Senator (Bruce Davison, famous for the bedside death scene in the AIDS weepie LONGTIME COMPANION) lies on a gurney, infected by a terrorist version of his bete noire--mutants. He has persecuted the mutants of the United States, and now they have made him one of them--at the expense of his body. In short, read it as: ACT-UP infects Jesse Helms with AIDS. And the climax of this tragedy comes when Davison (also known as the child molester in SHORT EYES) looks up at hit-and-run diva Halle Berry, a tragic mulatto in a blond wig, and asks, "Do you hate normal people?"
X-MEN is an Allegory of Queerness so dizzy and bent it could give Todd Haynes the vapors. Mutants--special people with special powers (read: desires)--are being persecuted by the right, threatened with "mutant registration," the firing of mutant teachers from grade schools, etcetera. An embittered Holocaust survivor (!), Magneto (Ian McKellen) plans to erase the un-evolved, pre-mutant human race. Buddha-calm, a mandarin Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) plans to save the benighted humans--even when they're picketing to throw mutants in jail. It's Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X--or is it Larry Kramer versus Harvey Fierstein? And to add weirdness to weirdness, Singer crams on the mutant superheroes, and their Magneto-driven nemeses, till you start to think the movie is a collaboration of Stephen King and Robert Altman--NASHVILLE set at a convention of the Tragically Telekinetic.
Poor Bryan Singer had to do it all--satisfy the comic-book geeks, placate Rupert Murdoch, and throw together some high-priced CGI and a low-priced cast to make a concoction to rock the mid-summer bells. He gets better than a gentleman's C; the last half hour, a rock concert of dueling powers, suggests the operatic splatter style of Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND. (Especially when a white-eyed Halle Berry is raising the roof and bringing on lightningbolts.) But Singer doesn't really have the pop-opera gifts of DePalma or even Paul Verhoeven.
Oddly, his best moments are the biggest action set pieces, not the sensitive "outsider" stuff. (Credit for that no doubt goes to the editors, the sound editors, Michael Kamen's score, the computer-animation guys...) As the dueling brains, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen have the right iconic quality, but unfortunately, no one else does. This is the kind of thing that has to be cast iconographically, physiognomically, like a Sergio Leone Western. Even when they fit their characters, the actors don't have that stamped-on-a-coin quality. (A possible exception: lithe, lissome Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as the shape-shifter Mystique.) Sequels could bent the perversity of it all in interesting directions. One hopes that next time Singer won't be tempted to outdo Renny Harlin in the eardrum-shattering sweepstakes.