Fantastic film . . .

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2000)

Ok, I admit, I was really worried about how this film would turn out. Being a die-hard X-Men fan, I had already accepted the fact that I would most likely be disappointed with the film. But to my surprise, X-Men is terrific. Director Bryan Singer was faced with a really tough task in trying to find a way to introduce the X-Men to those who weren't familiar with them, while at the same time providing an engrossing adventure for die-hard fans.
Well you can breathe a sigh of relief, because Singer pulls it off perfectly. Much of the first part of the film is spent introducing the characters and their powers, but I was never bored. Singer also did a fantastic job with the relationships between the characters. The bickering between Cyclops and Wolverine had the entire theather howling with laughter.
In one scene Wolverine comes back into a room where Cyclops, Storm, and Jean are, after he gets through fighting Mystique. Cyclops is about to blast him (thinking it's Mystique) and Wolverine says, "Hey wait, it's me." Cyclops replies, "Prove it." Wolverine responds with, "You're a dick." Cyclops, "Ok, good enough for me." The big brother/little sister relationship between Wolverine and Rogue helps us go deeper into the characters.
That's the beauty of this film. You go for the fantastic action scenes and special effects (and believe me, they're awesome) and you also get treated to a cast of characters that you fall in love with. My gripes with the film are very few and far between. Halle Berry sucked as Storm, but I expected that going in. Her dialogue consists of about 5 one-liners throughout the whole movie. Those who aren't familiar with the comic (or cartoon) won't notice anything wrong, but those of us who know what an important and fantastic character Storm is will be disappointed to see her reduced to this.
Second, Xavier has a huge role in the first half of the film, but very little in the 2nd half. Professor X gets . . . incapacitated half-way through the film, and spends the 2nd half of it lying in the X-Men infirmary, doing nothing more than showing off his bald head and hairy chest. Anyway, these are VERY minor gripes. Overall, I would give X-Men a 9 out of 10.