Brett Ratner instead of Bryan Singer. Alarming. Very.

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2006)

Brett Ratner instead of Bryan Singer. Alarming. Very. Brett Ratner is a guy who copies other directors' styles and makes mediocre movies (read "Red Dragon", where he copied Jonathan Demme and gave the film a generous portion of Ridley Scott). I didn't hate "Red Dragon", it just was what it was. Mediocre at best.
He entered the project a year and a half ago, to replace Bryan Singer. Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg wrote a script in zero time that seems to work just fine. And that's pretty much what Ratner puts up there on the screen: a movie that works just fine. Let's not get too enthusiastic.
On the flip-side we've got some of the performances. Of course, Halle Berry, is just a crashing bore. Her character Storm plans to take over after Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). This is a complete miscalculation by the filmmakers, as nobody really likes Storm. Storm's prominent role in the series has to do with Halle Berry's (undeserved) star status.
Some of the mutants in the Brotherhood are really colorless, but I guess that's bound to happen as they are the villain's henchmen (and the movie only has 104 minutes at its disposal). In the first movie Singer used a couple of villains that worked great. In Penn and Kinberg's script there's a little too much going on, and too many characters - and so little time. I guess that's what happens when the production team has got 14 months to make a worthy sequel. They do succeed though - kind of. But they do not excel.