Execrably bad

Rating: 1/10 (16 July 2000)

Was "The Usual Suspects" a fluke? Bryan Singer turns in a decidedly B-movie job directing this flat, predictable comics adaptation. It's almost too faithful to its original medium, with 2-d performances from all the principals except for Hugh Jackman (as the grouchy Wolverine, he displays the closest thing to personality among these cardboard cut-outs). Patrick Stewart is lifeless. Ian McKellen, who was believably dark in Singer's "Apt Pupil," here only looks very drowsy. And the X-Men themselves look like the cast of "Dawson's Creek" in drag.
This film has endless problems. The action sequences, and in particular the climactic battle in and on the Statue of Liberty, look terribly staged: just as on the comics page, the characters halt to strike dramatic poses, or dotingly brandish their "super powers" (one of them, hilariously, even utters at one point: "Storm, use your power!"). It simply doesn't work any more than if Singer had put speech bubbles above the characters' heads. Compare these silly little fights to the superb sequences in Jet Li's "Black Mask," (1996), a film shot for a fraction of this one's budget but obviously with much greater talent and vision.
For a comic with a rich graphical past, the movie's art direction delivers a strangely bland, sterile look, both for Professor X's school and for the Liberty set. Both look low-budget, but neither is quite as bad as the villain's secret seaside hideout, which Singer shot in such darkness that nary a detail can be seen.
Oddly, "X-Men" looks like two different movies. The first 15 minutes are lavishly designed and shot, from the opening flashback of Jews herded into a concentration camp to the discovery of a Wolverine slumming in a moody northern logging camp. Then, abruptly, the flair is gone, and for the remaining 90 minutes we get a film that looks like one of the Star Trek TV franchise vehicles. (Except for Storm's look: it's pure Penthouse Magazine, ca. 1975, with Halle Barry's vapid expression rounding out the bill.) The villains are half-comically done, but even that is a blunder by Singer -- we don't really get any comic relief from them, and we can hardly worry too much about the X-men if they're beset by the likes of a villain called Toad, and even less when they remind us of the far wittier and better-looking send-up of all this nonsense, last year's "Mystery Men."
Apart from the inanities, there is also a true sin: it's unforgivably trite when a pulp fiction like this one hijacks the Holocaust to inflate its meagre storyline and insincere theme. "X-Men" isn't really an allegory of genocide, or even merely of racism. That stuff is just tacked on to what is really an exercise in big fights and big boobs -- the old Marvel formula. Fights and boobs aren't bad in their own right, but they're done much better elsewhere without the pretensions to social justice.