Sub-par movie. All that superb character development done by the actors and previous director buried under a pile of trite one-liners and snooze-inducing 'action' scenes.

Rating: 1/10 (26 May 2006)

There were just so many things that were not good about this movie.
Dialogue was awful. Pretty much on par with 'Save the Last Dance.' i.e. you could pretty much guess what was going to be said by each character in each scene. It's like they had a book of common expressions and drew exclusively from that. There's cheesy dialog and then there's dialog that could have been written by any fourteen year old girl with an unhealthy obsession with teen dramas and daytime television.
So much of the dialog was just painfully unnecessary. Seriously, if you show a family in a car pinned on both sides by two other cars *and* show them struggling and failing to get their doors opened you really don't need the characters to tell us that *beat* *beat* *wait for it* "We're trapped!" I think the audience figured that one out about 10 seconds ago.
Nothing about this movie flowed or felt organic. Every scene was stilted and staged. Some scenes just dragged on and on and seemed to have no point at all. Well, other than to set up some gag inducing teenage melodrama. Those editors (along with the director) need to be taken out and slapped. All those pauses between lines and the ceaseless switching from Character 1 to Character 2 back to 1 and then to 3 and then to 1 to 5 to 2, etc--with no one saying anything at all. There's communicating with a look and then there's having a five way telepathic conversation minus voice overs and subtitles.
Visually, it was no more dynamic than the kind of footage aired on the six o'clock news. If I were deaf (and there were points I was crying out to God to make me so) I still wouldn't be impressed by this movie. There were no striking images. No new effects. No old effects used with new and creative twists. And maybe it was just my theater but the colors were most unimpressive. There were no shots that made me go, "Damn, that's on just this side of stunning!" Or if they were they were quickly forgotten as I was inundated by more inane dialog. And don't even get me started on the 'Trashy Romance Novel' shot. Why, Brett Ratner? Whyyyyyyyyy?!
The action scenes just didn't have any 'oomph' to them. Impossible you say? Not so, I tell you. You can in fact film a fight scene with Wolverine, Beast, and Iceman and still have it come out boring. But there were a few 'chase' scenes that were entertaining. Not so much for their action content but more for their humor.
Sigh. I could go on but I'd rather just put this abysmally disappointing experience behind me. But before I do I'd just like to add that I had forgotten that the director was not Bryan Singer but instead Brett Ratner. I didn't remember until roughly 30 minutes before the movie ended. So I wasn't expecting bigger and better things nor was I looking to compare the two filmmakers' styles. But I am none the less less than impressed by this film, its director and its editors. It was not a good movie.