Not bad . . . not great . . . but not bad.

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2014)

'The X-Men' is the first action movie in a long time that doesn't overload itself with special effects in an effort to give the audience it's money's worth. This is a film more about ideology than fistfights (though it has a few). I'm not an X-Men fan but that doesn't matter. The characters have a 35-year continuity in comic books but the movie never assumes that you know that.
We are sometime in the near future when man is facing a new stage of evolution. Mutants live as outcasts on a fringes of society. Each one of them has an extraordinary gift to, say, walk through walls or change shape. A senate hearing is being held to decide whether or not to catalog these freaks of nature before they begin figuring out that crime pays. The anti-mutant stance is taken up by the McCarthy-like Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) The story centers on a girl named Rogue (Anna Paquin) whose fate is positively Shakespearean because whenever she touches someone's skin she drains their life force (freeze tag must have been hell). She runs away and meets a fellow mutant, a drifter named Logan (Hugh Jackman) who has an extra skeletal structure made of a substance called Antimantium which includes knuckle-blades which retract apparently with great pain. The two get into an accident and end up at a private school run by a wheelchair-bound psychic named Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart).
His school provides a safe haven for mutants and teaches them how to use their powers in a positive way. At the school we meet the professor's confidants: Cyclops who has deadly laser beams for eyes; Storm who can dredge up bad weather and Dr. Jean Grey who moves objects with her mind.
Xavier's nemesis is a holocaust survivor named Magneto (Ian McKellan) whose has the power to bend steel. He is positive that a war is coming between humans and mutants. His plan is to use a machine to turn all humans into mutants. His small band includes a blue-skin shape-shifting femalien named Mystique (Rebecca Romjyn-Stamos), the wookie-like Sabertooth (Tyler Mane) and Toad (Phantom Menace's Ray Park) who lashes his tongue like a bullwhip.
The first hour of 'X-Men' spends a lot of time developing characters. That's good because there is a lot of ground to cover. I was genuinely interested in these characters and their powers and I was glad that writer David Hayter had patience enough to spend some time letting me get to know them. If the first hour seems too talky consider how many action movie these days contain almost no dialogue that isn't thrown in to string the action scenes together.
After a tedious jukebox light show like the awful 'Batman and Robin' I was happy to see a comic book adaptation that settles down and tells a story. Unlike Batman and Superman, The X-Men are darker superheroes, hunted and hated outcasts living in the shadows. I like this approach. I get a little tired of cities where superheroes are seen as minor celebrities.
I also liked the intellectual battle going on between Professor Xavier and Magneto. It's a battle of the mind and of ideas instead of machines and muscle.
'X-Men' is a smarter film then you might expect. When I see a film based on popular characters that I'm not familiar with I try to see if the movie can tell me what the appeal is. 'Pokémon the Movie', 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' and 'Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' failed to generate much interest from me. But I can see why people would like the X-Men, they are smart, clever, they have individual personalities and they're kinda cool.