Singer has a problem!

Rating: 5/10 (28 May 2009)

The first superhero movie by Bryan Singer that I saw was Superman Returns and I knew at once that here was a director that had all the art to make a good artistic movie but just could not deliver too well on the action front. Superman Returns had some really neat and nice effects but the movie just moved too slow to leave a lasting impression on me. Same I found with X-Men (which I repeat I saw after I saw Superman Returns).
The movie of X-Men just fails to weave all the pieces together. It is about a group of mutants divided into two sections. One led by a good man named Xavier, a psychic who believes that the powers of the mutants can be used for the good of the mankind and the other section led by Magneto, a man who believes in condemning humans. And needless to say, the movie is all about how the bad guys scheme in order to get their work done and somehow the good guys managed to prevent them. And no points for guessing - no prominent good guy dies in the end.
The special effects are decent. But I always believed that there is nothing in this world that can substitute a good old close-up fight. CGI rarely manages to give you the impact that a good-old staged fight can give you. The best example is the comparison of fight between Jackie Chan's CGI based "The Medallion" and the older movies of Chan where he does everything for real. None of the fights were truly enjoyable to me. And I also do not believe that it is the fact that the fighters are not humans that ticked me off. Because even in the Matrix trilogy, the fighters were superhuman but the movie makers managed to add some believable aspect to the movie.
Maybe, just maybe, it is possible that for someone who has read the original X-Men comic books by Marvel might like the movie for it gives them a chance to see their comic book characters come alive but for someone like me who wants the story told from scratch, I do not see anything great in this movie. The cast is good but the movie is either too short for all of them or maybe too dumb, I am again not sure of that.
To briefly summarize what I felt about the movie is that it fails to impress. There is no character you can sympathize with. There is no character whose profile you can construct at the end of movie simply because the movie does not spend any amount of time telling you about anyone. Anyone watching the movie can easily guess that there has to be a sequel and two more sequels have been released. How they score, I do not know but I am going to get right to seeing the second and third installments of the movies to see if Bryan has been able to do something good to them.