- Because I usually think of Bryan Singer's X-Men as a founding member of the League of Modern Superhero Summer Blockbusters, I was surprised upon my recent rewatching at just how different this movie is from its modern antecedents. To think that it was once possible for a superhero movie to clock in under two hours! Its plot is comically simple even by comic book standards, and the wire-fu fight scenes bear a stronger resemblance to the cartoonish action of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix than to more recent visceral super-slugfests. Although I'm an unapologetic fan of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (well, 2/3 of it anyway), isn't it sometimes nice to take a vacation from the brooding and the breaking of bones? And to top it all off, because it was released in 2000, X-Men never once utters the word "terrorist" nor blows up a single building. Ahh, those were happier cinematic times.
- Despite these marked differences in tone and style, that doesn't necessarily mean that X-Men is any better than modern superhero films. In fact, portions of it are quite clunky, presumably because it has to cover such a large cast and plenty of exposition so quickly. Fortunately, the cast is anchored by two incredible talents: Patrick Stewart as the benevolent mentalist Professor X and Ian McKellen as his malicious opponent Magneto. The two veteran stage and screen actors are so perfect as the diametrically opposed yin and yang in the struggle for mutant rights that even the recently rebooted X-Men franchise has them reprising their roles. As Magneto, McKellen is particularly convincing as a mutant whose evil tendencies are no worse than anything the world has done to him. The audience can't exactly root for the guy, to be sure, but certainly we can appreciate why Xavier would never give up on his old friend. And as for Xavier himself, Stewart's sonorous voice makes the film's abundant narration sound far more fascinating than it probably has any right to be.
- The rest of the film's cast divides fairly cleanly into those who do a good job and those who manage not to get in the way. Especially commendable is the then-unknown Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, whose razor-sharp claws and rugged exterior belie a noble lost soul. Sure, he's not as violent as many of his comic incarnations, but in my opinion that's mostly for the better. His traveling companion and fellow estranged mutant Rogue (Anna Paquin) is equally compelling, if only because her mutant powers render her literally incapable of human contact. Rounding out the good guys are the telepathic yet underconfident Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), the uptight Cyclops (James Marsden), and a rather non-electrifying Storm (Halle Berry). Belonging to The Brotherhood of Mutants (who sensibly deleted the word 'Evil' from their organization's name) are mostly ignorable versions of Toad (Ray Park) as a martial-arts expert and Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) as a snarling incompetent. Shapeshifting Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), on the other hand, could have been interesting if she wasn't completely covered in distracting layers of blue body paint. I'm not saying she should remove the paint, just that I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found the whole approach to be distracting.
- At this point, I've introduced all the characters and haven't really had time to deal with the film's plot. In that respect, I have much in common with the makers of X-Men who spitballed something together about a device that can turn normal humans like the McCarthyesque anti-mutant Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) into giant blobs of mutated jelly, whether or not it was supposed to work that way. Regardless, there are some battles in a remote part of Canada, in a train station, on a train, and finally on the Statue of Liberty. This last location has never been as well-used as in Hitchcock's Saboteur, and indeed the epic final battle fizzles out in a way that makes me strongly prefer the film's non-action sequences. Overall, the film is a perfectly adequate live-action adaptation of a series that, as a yellow spandex joke suggests, is better-suited to comics than the big screen. X-Men is just good enough to launch a franchise that, like its mutants, would leap forward rather quickly in the next installment.
- Stan Lee has a cameo as a man at a hot dog stand.
