A disappointment at best...

Rating: 2/10 (26 May 2006)

and a horrible travesty at worst.
Honestly, I have trouble knowing where to begin listing the problems inherent to this cinematic train wreck. All in all, this is rather fitting, since the film itself seemed similarly unsure of its own starting point. After a pair of unconnected and disjointed flashback sequences (both of which foreshadow events that are ultimately relegated to subplots by the movie's end), the movie launches into a superfluous action sequence, which then segues into a third, seemingly unrelated, plot.
"Plot," in this case, means "killing off main characters for meaningless shock value," as is rather easily discerned from the movie's multiple trailers. As is also readily evident in the vast assortment of media in the pre-release hype-blitz, several members of the established character roster make their cinematic debuts in this installment of the series. Unfortunately, their development as characters and their involvement in the plot never significantly exceeds that readily evident in two-minute teaser trailers.
Therein lies the rub  I was able to pretty much extrapolate the plot of this movie in its entirety from a two-minute teaser trailer circulated on the Internet. It's not that this plot is necessarily all bad. Despite a somewhat rocky start, there were portions of the movie's middle stretch that I somewhat enjoyed, or at least didn't loathe. There were still frequent instances of hackneyed writing, technical inaccuracies, and infidelity to the source material that irked me a bit, but I was able to convince myself that I was being too harsh. After wading through the preliminary awkwardness, I was ready to sit back and enjoy the remainder of the plot, the portion that would diverge from the setups seen in the trailers and stand on its own two feet  and then that part never came. There were a couple of large, vapid visual-effects fight scenes which made very little sense, and the movie just kind of stopped.
There was also a post-credit coda that added pretty much nothing to the debacle.
In short, there are a couple of moments that might make this move worth a rental, but it's definitely not worth the price of a theater ticket. Here's hoping that Bryan Singer's return to the comic-movie forum later this summer makes up for it.