Fun, but really it's "Wolverine - the Movie"

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2000)

Comics adaptations are inevitably bad, and a source of great pain to comics fans, so I really expected this film to be very, very bad. The in-production coverage for X-Men screamed "Batman meets The Matrix", too many corridors, too much grey-toned scenery, sculpted grey plastic costumes. Imagine my surprise, then, that it turned out to be the second best fun movie I saw all summer. It was all lean, no-fat non-stop action. The plot was dumb, starts pretentious then slides into an animated X-Men conclusion, but the breathless style carried it off.
It has its faults, true, but like the comic these come from its strengths. Wolverine is the only real character, the coolest and sexiest in a very dull bunch, and this is the only part with any meat or development. The other X-Men you've heard of show up, "do powers", and leave, prototypes for the action figures they hope your kids are buying by the truckload. The women have breasts, which is nice, and one is basically body-painted butt nekkid, to bring in the arrested-development demographic. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, grand old exports of English theatre, bring personal gravitas to underwritten parts, and regardless of how well the film works McKellen remains hopelessly miscast. The bad guys are bad, but what can you expect from a wrestler and a stunt man? Toad is one of the dullest villains in comics history, and the movie just keeps throwing ludicrous new powers at him in a vain hope he'll seem less lame. Please say they're not in the sequel.
For the sake of the effects budget, I'm sure, most of the fight scenes take place in fog, snow or shadow. Sadly, hiding the strings also makes what should have been absolute show-stoppers difficult to follow.
Its a great blueprint for future franchise efforts, which we can be sure everyone else with a superhero film on their slate will ignore.