Dreadful.

Rating: 2/10 (18 June 2011)

Two things, first:
1. I LOVE X-Men, both comics and movies. Always have.
2. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are spared from this, because they were fine. Great, in fact. The best thing about this movie is when the two of them are on the screen at the same time.
With that said, there are no words for how disappointed I was in this film. When I first heard of the movie, I was a little excited, though not that interested in an origin story. Saw the previews, thought it looked terrible. But then I heard great things, from people I trusted. So I go, and by the end of the movie, I was laughing at the utter stupidity of the film.
The script is more than terrible, and when you add in a cast like this (again, except McAvoy/Fassbender), it gets even worse. There was just no care or emotion inspired in me for any of the other characters in the film, at all--I'm looking at you, January Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Oliver Platt, and Edi Gathegi. Then, by the end, it devolves into a near-farcical level of parody.
The best thing about X-Men, both in comic and earlier movie form, was that it was preachy without ever SEEMING preachy. It always had such a good story with such great character dynamics that you never really felt like you were being drilled over the head with something. But (spoiler here) if I had to hear Jennifer Lawrence say with her creepy, childish gumption "Mutant and proud" one more time, I might have died of laughter.
The effects are nice, and the direction is well thought out, at least (even if the editing/sound/music do their best to try and ruin even that). Put it this way, regarding the editing of the film: there was more than one time when I pulled out the old line from MST3K: "Scene budget must have ran out." It just stops mid-scene and cuts to something else, sometimes completely unrelated to the previous one.
All in all, I'm starting to think that I'm the crazy one. Normally, I agree with the majority of critical opinion, both from my friends and from this site. But I'll say this, and despite being a person prone to hyperbole, I'm being as serious as I can: if I never see a movie this bad at the theater ever again, I'll be happy.