mindless but with reasonable FX

Rating: 4/10 (28 August 2000)

With the basic concepts of 'strange powers appearing at puberty' and 'reaction of society to the perceived threat from within', it is easy to envisage a movie embracing and exploring the concepts of youth alienation, discrimination in modern society and even how brittle 'civilisation' is in respect to perceived internal threats, from race to communism -or capitalism, depending on your economic system.
The X-Men is not such a movie. Instead the post-pubertal characters hide from society, appearing only to wage war on an enemy called 'Magneto'. Somehow my willing suspension of disbelief is unwilling to suspend itself at the sight of a character seemingly straight out the depths of the Flash Gordon universe, which kind of restricts one's enjoyment of the show.
The other item which somewhat hampered my willing belief suspension was the use of a supersonic vertical take-off and landing fully-stealthed aircraft as the X-men's transport. If they can build those without needing the infrastructure of a military jet manufacturer -why waste time with minor special powers when they could go into business selling such aircraft at $2 billion a throw?
Apart from those foibles, it is mostly harmless fun, although it leaves itself suspiciously wide open for sequels. This may be no bad thing -the batman series certainly got darker and more thoughtful when Tim Burton took over. Of course, using Batman as an example one is forced to point at the Joel Schumacher followups, including the widely despised Batman and Robin. X-Men is nowhere near that bad, but the sequels could go either way.