A plodding, wasteful film

Rating: 2/10 (20 September 2001)

How can the same man who directed the taut and surprising "The Usual Suspects" have been involved in a film this banal? "X-Men" is a plodding, pointless, unexciting, and wasteful film. Wasteful, because the excellent cast is given absolutely nothing to do. Plodding and pointless because, well, it is. Every scene is a few seconds too long, every plot point telegraphed a few minutes in advance. There is simply nothing fresh in "X-Men," nothing to distinguish it from any B-grade action movie, except for the special effects; and the film leans on so heavily on effects that I don't doubt that the plot was an afterthought.
I was never a reader of the comic book series, so I can't compare it to that, but I can recall around 1988 when Terry Gilliam was attached to this film and my comic-reading friends were beside themselves in anticipation of how Gilliam's visual sense would bring the world of the X-Men to the screen. Well, 12 years later, this is the flat, unimaginative film we got instead.