Unfaithful, Ill-conceived, Preposterous

Rating: 5/10 (25 May 2006)

**This contains very minor spoilers** I was really very excited for this movie, but having seen footage of the Danger Room sequence at the beginning I didn't have very high hopes. If you've seen this scene, you can pretty much apply that to the whole movie. It contains cheesy dialog, sub-par performances (despite good actors), a horrible plot, but worst of all: it completely fails to represent the characters as they are in the comics or other movies. Magneto is a horrible strategist in the film- he doesn't care when other mutants are lost. Wolverine is completely out of character, the Pheonix Force makes Jean look undead rather than- you know- like a pheonix (I didn't see any flames), Juggernaut is a joke, Callisto is reduced to a poor man's Quicksilver (the super speed looks like it's from Smallville). In the final battle, most of the mutants there (Magneto!) could easily win the fight in an instant but instead use their powers in the most inefficient way possible: Magneto and Pyro "team up" to launch flaming cars at the enemy. Magneto could easily tear up a car and shoot everyone with a chunk of it, while pyro could BURN THEM. All the time spent on this movie went into thinking up the coolest special effects possible, and that failed too. It's not that I couldn't get past the bad plot, it was that the effects were tied to the plot in a sickening way. Throughout the whole move I was thinking, "Singer, where art thou". The best part of the movie- and I REALLY hate to say it- was the new Superman Returns trailer at the beginning. He gets shot in the eye slo-mo and it bounces right off!