Loading ...Movie Review - X-Men
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(1 votes, average: 1 out of 4)
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2000 / 104 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Ben Heckendorn
This is my first review that I have written for this site, and I have picked “X-Men, The Movie”. Mostly because I don’t think Dale has seen it yet. Well, I was there opening night, to see it on the Marcus ULTRA-SCREEN screen screen echo echo…. 75 pulse-pounding feet of silver-screen excitement! (Did you know that they actually USE silver on the screens to make them reflect better? Really!)
Anyway, I remember long ago that Mike said to me “Ben, you’re going to come to see “X-Men” with me next summer!” and I was like “No! I flatly re-FUSE!” See, at that point in time, everyone was predicting that it would be a suck-fest, and the only reason Mike wanted to see it was for Baldy (Patrick Stewart) and Rebeccaa Romijn-Stamos (or Rebecca Romijn-ROMIJN as Mike so wishfully calls her, sorry Mike!)
But, you know, as the movie got closer to coming out, the buzz slowly got better. Remember, everyone thought “The Matrix” was going to suck before it came out! (People are so hard on Mr. Whoah!) Anyway, by the time “X-Men” was about to come out, I had a pretty good idea that it might be good. Mike said, on the way to the theatre “I fully expect it to suck, but I don’t care.”
AIN’T IT COOL NEWS-ESQUE NONSENSE THAT BEARS NO SEMBLANCE TO ANYTHING: The day I saw this movie, I ate some french fries, 2 beers, and some gum. Yes, I did swallow the gum, so that counts as ‘eaten’. It was Wrigley’s Spearmint. The beer was drank hours before I saw the movie, so it does not affect my review. The beer was Bud Light, in a bottle. I also bought a camcorder battery on the way there. It was a Sony brand Info Lithium. And we took Mike’s car. Oh, and I looked at the “Star Trek II” DVD at Suncoast, but they wanted 26 bucks for it, so I thought “later”. That’s about it.
The theater filled to the rim with people, sold out. Not many kids, lots of high schoolers, and lots of older people (ie: 30’s). Lots of women, too. Women actually were going to a movie called “X-Men”. Huh… Then, the movie started…
My philosophy is that at a certain point in any movie, you know whether it will suck or be good. I remember thinking while watching “The Matrix”, as soon as Agent “I Kick A Lot Of Ass” Smith said “No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.” that it was gonna be good. Then, of course, in a bad movie, like, oh, most movies that come out nowadays, what happens is that at a certain point in the movie (usually the 45-minute mark) you realize that the movie isn’t going to get any better. That it’s gone past the Point Of No Return. That’s when you start thinking about what you’ll eat for supper, if the laundry needs done, or Atari, in my case.
In “X-Men”, during the opening scene you KNOW that it’s different. It starts in a concentration camp in Poland, where young Magneto first uses his powers after being separated from his parents. This sets the tone for the movie: That mutants exist in our world, and it’s outrageous, but it’s still grounded in reality. And things don’t get much more real than the Holocaust.
ANYWAY! The movie jumps to The Not So Distant Future (in which every television is widescreen, there ya go, Ben K) and the story begins. The running sub-plot is Senator Kelly’s idea that mutants should be registered because they are dangerous. That’s a great idea, because Lord knows the government wants to regulate EVERYTHING. Again, it grounds the movie in reality. It also gives Magneto a GASP! “motivation” (Hollywood screenwriters - take note: you need those!). He sees things in the world reverting back to (or rather, not progressing much since) the Holocaust, and he’s trying to do something about… Which is basically his plot. To make mutants accepted. By HIS means.
Charles Xavier, played by Baldy, is after the same thing. But he does it by training the mutants to use their powers for good, beligerently. He and Magneto’s characters play very well off each other because they are the ‘good and bad guys’, so to speak, but they are after the same thing. They just have different ways of doing it.
The movie then starts introducing characters. It centers mostly on Wolverine and Rogue, but Cyclops and Jean “I’m In The Goldeneye Videogame You Know” Grey also have lots of screentime. The Jean Grey-Cyclops-Wolverine thing is done very well. Wolverine of course wants to bone Jean Grey because he’s heard of her powerful legs, but she’s going out with Cyclops. Lots of uneasy tension. Sample dialog:
Wolverine: “I suppose you’re going to tell me to stay away from your girl, right?”
Cyclops: “No, because if I did, she wouldn’t really be my girl, would she?”
Wolverine: “You’re right.”
(dialog, dialog, Cyclops walks out the door;)
Cyclops, sticking his head around corner “By the way, stay away from my girl.”
Which is great, and there’s lots more stuff like that. Culminating in the dialog after the Wolverine-Mystique fight. I loved that line! It’s a big laugh, but it also serves the plot, and develops both characters, and their attitudes towards each other, at the same time. Very efficient!
Hugh Jackman is very, VERY good as Wolverine. He doesn’t carry in the usual star baggage, and he wasn’t busy trying to ‘protect’ himself by re-writing his lines or any of that crap. He just took the role and went with it. Maybe just because he looks a little like him, but it was almost like watching one of the first Clint Eastwood movies and thinking “This guy might be REALLY big someday…” Wolverine brought to the screen something sorely lacking from modern cinema. The tough-as-nails working man everyday chick-magnet hero. And I don’t mean the people like Will Smith in “ID4″, or Bruce Willis in “Armageddon A Headache”. You won’t really realize what you’ve been missing until you see Hugh Jackman in action.
Magneto is an AWESOME bad guy. His magnetic skills kick utter amounts of ass. Remember in “This Movie is Not Enough”, how the bad guy didn’t feel pain, but they didn’t use that in the plot? Well, they use EVERYTHING here. Magneto walks around opening doors by thought, controlling Wolverine (since his skeleton is metal), and making paths appear in front of him by causing bits of metal to join together. There is so much creativity in this movie, I loved it!
Speaking of that, this movie treated the characters SERIOUSLY. There’s nothing cheesy like, oh, Magneto zipping up his pants by thought, or Wolverine opening a can of SpagettiO’s with his claws. They respected the characters. Which is good. Because movies lack sincerity nowadays. Ug! It’s all that damn “Batman Forever”’s fault. That steaming pile of worm-infested donkey-dung!
I’ve read a lot about Storm sucking. She’s the least developed character to be sure, but she doesn’t suck. They did give her the cheesiest line, but, oh well. The part where she floats out of the elevator all pissed is awesome, so who cares? It, along with other parts of this movie, actually sent shivers through me! Toad knocks her down an elevator shaft and is like “Ha, ha! Die! I was in Star Wars! Gr!” Then, a bit later, the elevator goes DING and he looks over. The door opens, and Storm is there, eyes a-glow. She floats out and proceeds to BLOW HIM AWAY! (literally) It was great.
Sabertooth and Mystique were good, as well. Sabertooth doesn’t do much besides be big and tough, but, so? He was kinda like a Klingon, actually. Mystique can change shape, of course. I bet Mike wishes she would morph from John Stamos’s wife into his, but I guess he’ll have to wait until the sequel to see if that ever happens. The things she does do, the people she becomes, serve the plot well and are actually surprising in some cases! For instance, to get into a secret X-Men room, she morphs into Baldy so the retinal scanner will allow her to enter. And so forth. Toad is really neat. He jumps around and has a long tongue, and he really uses it! To close doors, grab people, things, climb, etc. Again, the mutant’s powers are actually USED instead of just there for show.
The overall plot of the movie works well, and the action is pretty good to boot. Magneto’s plot of having a device turn people into mutants may seem lame, but it’s relevant. The ‘forced conformism’ thing. If you think about it, there’s all sorts of devices used to control people in the world today! (one’s called television) But “X-Men” is really about the characters, that’s what really works, and that’s good. Wolverine has a great scene with Rogue on a train, the kind of thing you usually don’t see in movies about mutated people duking it out to save the earth. And the subtle touches are great as well. Like when Rogue (who can’t touch people without killing them) looks over at a mother caressing her daughter’s cheek. Or the kid whose looks at Cyclops and his mom hurries them away from him. I liked the scene where they launch their jet, and the hanger door is also the basketball court (of the Mutant College), and you see the ball start to shake, then bounce, then roll… Then the hanger doors open and it falls in… then the jet flies out. This movie actually has SUBTLETY and SUBTEXT! The movie didn’t seem short to me, because they pack lots of stuff in! Besides, I’m sick of long movies. Seems every damn thing has to be 2 hours 20 minutes anymore. They of course leave it VERY open for a sequel, and I’ll say it now, I’ll be there opening day!
I suppose now I should mention any problems I had with the movie… SLIGHT SPOILER:…
Maybe the fact that it ends/they win because of one optic blast from Cyclops, but if anything that’s merely anti-climatic. It’s low budget (for a summer movie) and it does show in some places. The budget was similar to “The Matrix” but “X-Men” looked cheaper. Maybe because they didn’t blow up as much stuff. But that’s really all I can think to bitch about. I find it interesting that the 2 recent well-done yet low-budget action movies (”The Matrix” and “X-Men”) were produced one by Joel Silver and the other by Richard Donner, in that order.
Coincidence? Perhaps the age of Good Action Movies is returning. Who better to bring it? We all love “Die Hard” and the “Lethal Weapons”. (We’ll forget “Fair Game”, Silver made up for it, in spades.)
OVERALL: This is only the 3rd movie I’ve seen this year (besides “MI:2″ and “Chicken Run”) and I have enjoyed it most. “MI:2″ was the most un-comprehensive laughable mess I’ve seen in a while. If I want to watch crap I have a toilet, I shouldn’t have to pay 7 bucks to see it. “Chicken Run” was very good but it dragged in Act 2 and was basically the same movie as “A Bug’s Life” (probably not intentionally). Dale will probably kill me for saying this, but it WAS saddled with the typical Disney-esque “character that lies to everyone then runs away in shame but comes back at the end” motif, which I felt wasted a good 30 minutes of the movie. Well, moreso, not wasted but not as good as the rest of the movie. Other than that, nothing else looked interesting to me! I mean, GREAT ANOTHER WAR MOVIE. Or GREAT ANOTHER DISASTER FILM. “X-Men” looked different. And it was. The audience loved it. They laughed, they cheered, they clapped at the end. And I decided to put a big X on my computer screen at work. High praise for me!
Since I am new, here is a pretentious list of what I thought of other movies, so you can decide if I’m full of it or not.
Casablanca: A+
Robot Monster: D- (for effort)
Any Cameron Film Except “The Abyss”: A or A+
Batman: B+
Batmans 3 & 4: F-
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman: D
The Ten Commandments: A+
Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace: D (not F, because it’s fun to say “Ah, Nubian, we got lots a that!”)
