That’s my summation of the X-Men movie. I didn’t hate it as much as some of you guys, but basically I didn’t like it. I didn’t mind the heretical rewrite of the Phoenix saga so much. But the whole thing feels played out. Mutants are like gays. No, they’re like blacks. No, no: they’re like Jews, the handicapped, guns, drug addicts. I think the metaphorical stuff was clever, but now the franchise seems fascinated with its own cleverness. As if, by the third movie, we didn’t get the “ominous parallels.” Halle Berry clearly insisted on Acting With Lots of Capital Letter Speeches, adding to the already intolerable earnestness.
It’s possible I would have found all this tolerable if it weren’t for the fact that the storyline was so unimaginative. The first movie, if memory serves, was all about using a mutant to change humans into mutants. This one was all about using a mutant to turn mutants into humans. The first one had lots of Magneto speeches about intolerance, separatism, payback and lots of Prof X speeches about tolerance, unity and cooperation. Ditto the second one. Ditto third one. I could tolerate all that, even enjoy it, if it wasn’t so hard to remember which movie I was watching.
I have other peeves. Why didn’t they bring Nightcrawler back? Yes, the “psychic cocoon” thing was idiotic. Why couldn’t cerebro locate Jean? The 20 second crisis about whether the school would close was lame. Why did Magneto have to hang out in some grunge campground instead of some super cool lair? Etc. Etc. I did like Kelsey Grammer as the Beast
I know Brett Ratner , the new director, is taking a victory lap for how well the movie is doing. But this raises a more longstanding peeve of mine. Why do relatively unknown directors get to take so much credit for opening weekends? It’s not like the people lined-up outside X-Men III on opening day wouldn’t have been there if the directing was worse.