Not Uncanny

Rating: 2/10 (23 June 2006)

Accepting the homosexuality of others is, to my way of thinking, an enriching virtue...I have people in my life close to me who happen to be gay, and I'm about as straight and happily married as anyone can imagine.
So what are we to make of Singer's self-referential narratives of dealing with homophobia (it's less blatant in the first "X-Men")?
Well, for starters we don't have much of a movie vision here, with the exception of the opening attack on the Oval Office. Plainly, a different production team was in charge of delivering a knock out first punch.
The rest of this is just a flat morality play, the sort of thing that aims for a target containing "Spartacus" and "La Cage.../The Birdcage", while using big, colorful characters.
Shamefully, Singer approaches this from the angle of Bush-bashing (forgetting or ignoring that VP Cheney's daughter is openly and unapologetically gay - a fact that cost Bush some support from the Movement Right) and blaming the evil Republicans for all the woes of those "who are different"...a mother asks her son if he'd tried 'not being a mutant'...a father reprograms his 'deviant' son -- by the way, he's named Stryker after Julius Streicher, the infamous Jew-baiter and Nazi war criminal -- to suggest the US government supports this is deeply offensive.
Singer is a person who is granted the extraordinary power of directing a series about people who are granted extraordinary powers...and sadly, all he can offer us here is cheap, hackneyed moralizing.
Let's see Singer use some real power to take on the 'People's Republic' of China, where gays are routinely incarcerated in mental asylums.
Or follow the example of John Maynard Keynes, a gay man who changed the way the world thinks about economics (whether you agree with Keynes or not), and direct his powers at things other than preening and profiteering.