I will say this…after watching 48 Hrs., National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 got a whole lot more funny. :)
Rating:[Rating:3.5/5]
Date Night
April 10, 2010 by
“Date Night” is everything its trailers don’t make it appear to be–a hugely entertaining, rowdy, wacky slapstick film featuring two comic geniuses. Steve Carell and Tina Fey, two major stars of the two biggest sitcoms on NBC, have an exciting chemistry that carries this goofy, mainstream film to glorious heights.
The duo plays a middle-aged suburban married couple out for a night in New York City. After attempting to get a table at a fancy seafood restaurant, they are shot down cold, and decide to take the reservation of the seemingly absent Tripplehorns. Toward the end of their meal, two thugs arrive at their table and escort them out, quickly waving guns in their faces and demanding an important flash drive from them. Mayhem ensues as these two spend the night dodging crooked cops, mobsters, and bullets in the midst of a go-to mistaken identity plot.
Luckily for Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum II, yikes), this very mainstream script can’t bog down Fey and Carell. The two make an unstoppable pair when Levy stops the action in favor of their witty banter and improvisation. Add in some entertaining cameos from James Franco, Mila Kunis and supporting player Mark Wahlberg, and “Date Night” is a very funny, entertaining, action-romance-comedy serving up shameless mainstream hijinks. With the weight on the shoulders of Carell and Fey, this potential disaster of a movie, turns into the perfect date night movie. I really enjoyed it a lot more than I anticipated.
[Rating:4/5]
Aliens
April 9, 2010 by
From Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking 1979 horror classic spawned one of the most interesting and popular sequels of all time, helmed by a pre-king-of-the-world James Cameron. His 1985 follow-up to ‘Alien’ would take moviegoers out of the horrific confinement of the Nastromo spaceship and into the futuristic mining colony set up on LV-426, the original site of the previous attack from the first film.
Sigourney Weaver returns as Ellen Ripley, 57 years following her escape from a ravenous acid-for-blood monster that wiped out her crew. She awakens in a hospital where she is informed of the life she lost floating in space over a span of six decades. Her daughter died only a few years before Ripley’s lifeboat was discovered. What to do now? The government wants to suspend her pilot’s license and label her a crazy person for blowing up her crew’s starship from the first “Alien” film as no evidence of the creature could be found on Planet LV-426. Ripley is then made aware that a human colony of over 60 families have been living on the planet with no report of any ‘hostile organism.’ Soon, however, the agency loses contact with LV-426, and through an odd contrivance in the plot, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) is enlisted to request Ripley’s presence as an advisor to an elite group of hardcore colonial marines.  Ripley decides to face her greatest nightmare and join the band of soldiers sent to investigate the planet.
James Cameron, coming off his moderate success of “The Terminator,” took a great leap in converting the heralded and respected 1979 horror film “Alien,” and spinning the continuing story of Ellen Ripley into a beefed-up grunt of an action picture. The results are beyond impressive, even for its time roughly 25 years ago. While Fox Studios and other filmmakers may have simply wanted to immitate what Ridley Scott’s film did, Cameron wanted to expand the horizon of Ripley’s chararacter. Of course he’s always been fascinated with the strength of female heroines (see Sarah Connor in ‘Terminator 2’ or Neytiri in ‘Avatar’). This makes an ideal match for the Ellen Ripley character, played incredibly by Sigourney Weaver (in an Oscar-nominated performance), and the action-heroine she becomes. In some ways, “Aliens” represents the pinnacle of scale and intensity of all of Cameron’s resume. Sure, he has ‘T2’, ‘True Lies’, ‘Titanic’ and now ‘Avatar’ to his credit. Those films each had at least $100 million thrown at them. But with ‘Aliens,’ budgeted at $15 million dollars, the particular way the film is shot, to the believablilty of the animatronics used (still the best looking of any ‘Alien’ film to date), and to the film’s epic score by James Horner, you would predict the film (despite its grungy aesthetic) cost three times that amount.
While the man has seen enough praise in his life to become so self-impressed, the credit has to go to Cameron and his abilities to craft a film, at least in terms of scale. Sure, his screenplays have raised eyebrows here and there for their simplicity, but critics seem to forget that he likes to make mainstream action pictures. In many ways, while each of the man’s films go for broke every time and he continually tries to top every film he makes in terms of scale, he’s never out of his element. There’s something to be said about a filmmaker who is passionate about ‘what can be done’ in movies as opposed to ‘what can be written.’ While Cameron may be simplistic in nature in terms of character and theme, his movies have mass appeal, and ‘Aliens’ is no exception.
The film is filled with a fully-designed and realized world of Planet LV-426. From the marines’ attire and weapons, to the looming darkness and staleness of the mining colony, this movie definitely has grand set pieces and an unsettling atmosphere. The creatures are barely seen until the final battle between Ripley and the Queen alien. That’s the way it should be. Every shot of these creatures impresses and scares. There’s a great scene where the aliens first make their appearance. The marines are searching for missing colonists and enter a piece of the infrastructure where the creatures have ‘redecorated.’ Soon enough the aliens start to come out of the walls and pick off each of the marines. Why is this scene and others like it so effective? Because we see just enough to keep us enthralled and in a state of wonder. We are also enthralled by Stan Winston’s animatronic designs, puttetry and creature costumes. With an actual physical entity in camera, the creatures have never looked better, and probably never will. Future ‘Alien’ films would suffer from trashy CGI creations, especially the 1992 sequel ‘Alien3.’
As mentioned earlier, despite entertaining characters from Cameron regulars Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein, it is Sigourney Weaver’s powerful performance as a tougher Ripley than seen in 1979 that carries the movie. While most 80s films would feature a Schwarzenegger or Stallone taking on these monsters, a female character manages to oust her fellow male marine counterparts and take on several beasts, including a macho mano-a-mano dual with the Queen monster. Luckily, Cameron lets Weaver be more than just a female Rambo. His story gives her a drive to face these monsters and also protect a young colonist girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), reminiscent of her own deceased daughter. Weaver manages to make a believable transition from distressed space pilot in ‘Alien’ to machine-gun-toting large-scale exterminator here. Cameron would later use this kind of transition for his Sarah Connor character in ‘Terminator 2,’ and again with Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘True Lies.’
At the end of the day, ‘Aliens’ is quite simply one of the best sequels ever made. It’s an impressive-looking movie featuring a powerful dramatic musical score, great visuals, hardcore action, intense thrills, a dash of humor, memorable characters, and genuine emotion. Sequel or not, this one of my personal favorites.
[Rating:5/5]
Megalodon (times 2)
April 3, 2010 by
In the summer of 1975, people crowded into movie theatres
to see the work of a young genius named Steven Spielberg. They watched as a young woman, drunkenly laughing, led her boyfriend to the water’s edge, then began swimming out to sea. She was having a great time – and then suddenly, she disappeared. A few seconds later she reappeared, screaming, gasping and trying to fight, and then she was gone again. The whole thing took maybe ten seconds.
Movie goers sat transfixed, still feeling the terror that woman felt in her final moments. For years afterwards, millions refused to go into the water. And they never saw a thing. Oh, sure, for the next two hours (and then for three inferior sequels) Jaws turned the sea white with thrashing and red with blood, but no one has forgotten that first scene to this day.
Naturally, a classic will have imitators, and shark films have abounded ever since, but none have ever figured out what it was that made Jaws great. Most have clung to the belief that “bigger is better.†This is probably why there is a whole subgenre of “Megalodon†films.
Carcharodon Megalodon is the designation given by many scientists to a number of poorly-preserved fossils. These fossils seem to be essentially identical to those of the Great White Shark – except much larger. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcharodon_megalodon)
Megalodon, lovingly termed “Meg†by paleontolgists, is thought to have grown to 60 or 70 feet, and to have been extinct for 2.5 million years (Although a 60-foot Great White was reported around 500 years ago). So if a 25-foot Great White in Jaws was scary, a 70-foot Great White is even scarier, right? Sigh.
A meg mouth reconstructed in 1909.
I decided to get my feet wet in this world of the Hollywood Meg last night and came away with all my toes still attached. I first watched Megalodon, Dir. Pat Corbit, 2004 (hereafter Meg) and then Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Dir. David Worth, 2002 (hereafter SA3).
Meg is actually not too bad. You kind of have to get past the fact that they used prehistoric CGI to go with their prehistoric monster, and the fact that the editing is never quite right for building suspense, but the plot is straightforward and not too implausible. Two journalists arrive at a new multi-billion dollar oil rig to cover its first bite into the floor of the north Atlantic. But of course (say it with me now) Something Goes Wrong and the drill sinks into a previously undiscovered subterranean ocean. A few hours later, the rig begins to shake as something big swims out of the hole. Several people go down to check it out and they don’t all make it back up.
Painting by Csotonyi of a meg attacking a mosasaur.
If Meg has a strength, it’s its simplicity. In a 90-minute film, no time is wasted on character development. They give us just enough scenes to understand the general situation and what equipment the characters have to work with before introducing the threat. We are then treated to shots of the shark swimming around, crashing into steel girders and ramming it’s head through ice caps, trying to get at the people on top. These scenes are kind of cool, and in an undersea story, it only makes sense that we see the shark. All this might sound like damning with faint praise, but Corbit does deserve a nod for not trying to do more than he could.
The biggest problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any miniature work in Meg. This can be a good thing only if the CGI is flawless, and this CGI is … not. Still, it’s fun watching a giant shark chase a submersible through a maze of I-beams.
If there is anything good about SA3, it’s that the overall plot is very well put together. The action centers around a seaside resort in Mexico. It’s not surprising that a millionaire communications CEO (George Stanchev) is staying at this resort. It’s also not surprising that the area happens to be the crossroads for his company’s trans-pacific cable. And it’s not too surprising that the cable’s electro-magnetic pulses have lured a prehistoric shark out of the Challenger Deep, which has followed the cable to this very spot. As parts of large marine animals, and then people, begin to wash ashore at the resort, Ben Carpenter (John Barrowman), a life guard, begins to worry about the safety of
vacationers. When he finds a strange tooth in the cable, he sends the picture over the internet. A paleontologist in San Diego, Catlin Stone (Jenny McShane), recognizes the species and travels to the resort to study the meg. Thus it makes sense that all these characters are in the same place because they’ve all been drawn her by the effects of the cable. There’s plenty of conflict between them, too. Carpenter is intent on killing the shark, Stone wants to study it, and the rich guy just wants his system to get up and running.
Sadly, this movie has too many millstones around its neck to keep it’s head above water. It’s got the worst acting I’ve seen this side of grade school pageants. It’s downright painful to sit through scene after scene of cheesy dialogue, where you actually see actors turning their heads away from the camera right before they break out laughing (did they not have time for second takes, or what?). The low production values are also something to behold. If it hadn’t been for repeated references to the internet and cell phones, I would have sworn this was filmed in the ‘70s.
If you think this is real, you'll be terrified by "Shark Attack 3."
And of course, we have the token lack of subtly. Right in the first scene, we see a shot of the shark’s face rushing at the camera, and then chomping down on a welder. Later, a couple starts to make out on a water slide, which drops them into the ocean, and they are instantly attacked. No circling to be realistic or build suspense. We see the shark through the whole movie, and – get this – it actually growls! None of it is remotely plausible or scary, unless you’re the sort who has nightmares about being photographed and superimposed over a shark’s mouth.
The most pathetic thing about SA3 is that it tries so hard to be Jaws. The main characters go out on a boat and shoot guns and harpoons at the shark, the shark eventually sticks its head into the boat as in Jaws; the movie even copies Jaws 3, when the first meg is killed and then a bigger meg (possibly mom?) appears in the last 15 minutes to attack a cruise ship and swallow motorboats whole. It seems Worth was making it easy on himself with this one, counting on the principle that a movie doesn’t have to be good, as long as there are plenty of scenes of girls taking their bathing suits off.
Incidentally, don’t ask me what SA3 is a sequel to. A search of IMDB for “Shark Attack†turned up more movies than I could shake a stick at. Doubtless, the future will bring many more. Other marine monsters have made it to the movies from time to time (e.g. The Beast, Lake Placid), but none of them capture our imaginations the way sharks do. As the mayor explained in Jaws, “You yell ‘barracuda,’ everybody says ‘Huh? What?’ You yell ‘shark,’…â€
Panic scene from "Jaws."
Megalodon
[Rating:1.5/5]
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon
[Rating:0.5/5]
X2: X-Men United
March 23, 2010 by
With 2000’s X-Men, director Bryan Singer reassured moviegoers who grew disenchanted after years of mediocre schlock like Batman and Robin, The Punisher, and Howard the Duck, that comic book movies could be fantastical and far-fetched while still remaining firmly grounded in reality. Singer’s cast of mutants were portrayed as real humans with true-to-life struggles common to most of us ordinary folk: relationships, identity crises, and fitting in. It also delved far deeper into dark places of the human psyche, contained multi-faceted villains with compelling, even convincing, reasons for wanting to destroy all humanity, and a band of protagonists who were just as flawed as anyone we might meet in real life. It was a revelation for what comic book movies could be, and sparked a decade of mature-themed comic book movies that culminated in 2008’s near-flawless The Dark Knight.
In short, the bar was set understandably high, and with the return to the X-Men universe with X2, Singer set out to craft a sequel that stayed true first and foremost to the characters and storyline, with whiz-bang special effects and giant action setpieces taking a back seat to character drama and interpersonal conflict. And for the most part, X2 succeeds in what it sets out to do, which is to continue the struggle between Magneto and Professor Xavier as well as the broader conflict of mutants and the rest of humanity. It actually ups the ante of almost every aspect of its progenitor, but not just by adding bigger explosions and louder gunfights.
X2 focuses more on Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, as ripped and overly-coiffed as ever) and Magneto (Ian McKellan), and picks up pretty soon after the first one left off. Magneto is in a plastic prison, and Wolverine is searching for answers to his past at the mysterious Alkali Lake. Throughout the course of the film’s two hours, Wolverine learns more than he ever bargained for and realizes he needs to let bygones be bygones and get the heck on with his life, while Magneto nearly realizes his ambition to wipe out the whole of humanity who are not (and therefore fear) mutants.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
Along for the ride are a host of characters from the X-Men universe like Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, and all the rest of the usual suspects. And while the US government, under influence from General Stryker, is hunting down mutants, the X-Men must unite with Magneto and Mystique to stop Stryker from implementing his plan. Singer is a master at directing ensemble casts and delivering branching storylines, but at times the sheer weight of all the characters, conflicts, and backstories becomes a bit much to handle and some storylines get lost in the shuffle, particularly those of Rogue and Iceman.
What I find most compelling about the first two X-Men movies, though, is the motivation for all parties involved. At no point are any of the nemeses out to destroy, enslave, punish, or otherwise harm humanity for the sheer monomaniacal desire of doing so. Magneto, who experienced the result of fear and prejudice first-hand during his time in Nazi concentration camps, envisions a bleak future in which all mutants are cast out like their Jewish counterparts during Hitler’s regime. And his desire to stop such a future is certainly understandable, if not one which could even be condoned. Stryker’s son, we find out, is a mutant himself, and his father is so worried and afraid of what mutants could do to humanity that he would seem to be justified in his desire to bring down mutants across the world. Even Professor X, brought to life with the utmost grace and charisma once again by the marvelous Patrick Stewart, who combined to a wheelchair could out-act nearly anyone else in the film save McKellan, wants only to create a future where mutants and humans can peacefully coexist. And if that means stopping Magneto, so be it.
Jean Grey and Storm, fighting evil and bad hairdos.
There is also a wealth of social allegory in X2, though handled a bit more clumsily than I would have hoped. “Can’t you just stop being a mutant?” asks Iceman’s confused mother when she finds out he too has special powers. Faced with a chance to explore the issue of how we face our differences, Singer blows his opportunity and instead marginalizes all who dare to hold counter opinions and instead casts them as ignorant fools. But all social commentary and characterization aside, X2 also delivers in spades what its predecessor only hinted at: heapings of big-budget summer-movie action and PG-13 violence. From the military attack on the Professor X’s school for mutants, to the fight between Wolverine and Deathstrike, to fight scene after fight scene, there’s enough action in X2 to satisfy Michael Bay fans while delivering Kubrick-level characters and Shawshank-style plotlines. It’s a spectacle to behold (if you can forgive the laughable missile attack on the X-Men Blackbird) and is in nearly every way a worthy follow-up to the original.
Rating:[Rating:4/5]
Green Zone
March 12, 2010 by
Paul Greengrass, the frenetic action-director at the helm of “Green Zone” can’t seem to catch a break. “United 93,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Director a few years ago, hit the skids with moviegoers because the material was too soon. Now critics are stepping all over “Green Zone” for being too late. In reality, the film is a fact-fiction wrestling match full of smarts, thrills, and intensity. It’s too bad the film must suffer the fate of being compared to the recent Best Picture-winner “The Hurt Locker” and the other Damon-Greengrass collaborations of the last two Bourne installments, because–of course–this film shrinks in comparison. “Green Zone” is still a favorable action movie, and the best non-science fiction action film in the last few months.
Matt Damon, all heart here, plays Roy Miller, a U.S. Army team leader in the early stages of the Iraq invasion during the 2003 hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction. To Miller’s surprise, his team finds three targeted sites without any weapons. Where is the intelligence coming from and where are the W.M.D.’s? Getting his feet a little too wet, Miller takes it upon himself to find out the truth as to the validity of the government’s so-called sources.
Much of “Green Zone” simply makes for standard procedure with characters and dialogue unraveling in a conspiracy we know all too well. The fact that the movie takes place almost seven years ago doesn’t make it any less relevant today. It helps to take this retrospective approach and see the damage that was done after the fact. Did “Band of Brothers” have any relevance in 2002, or “We Were Soldiers”? I don’t think relevancy is a fair argument. Even though this is a political-agenda film through-and-through, it’s also a well-executed thriller with superb craftsmanship, stellar camera-work, ratcheted tension, and questionable editing. Luckily, Greengrass’ choppy trademark doesn’t become too much of a distraction here in the hand-to-hand combat.  In fact, much of the movie excels because the drama is always heightened to such a degree, that any ties to realism cease to matter, and we get caught up in the suspense of the fast-paced action. Matt Damon is the perfect heart to Green Zone’ s brain. He makes the film’s coincidental one-man heroics amidst a web of government conspiracy feel engaging if not plausible. Smart, entertaining action could be this weekend’s hot button, and the Greengrass-Damon duo know how to press it.
[Rating:3.5/5]
War Games
March 1, 2010 by
I saw War Games years ago when I was about six or seven years old, and my perception the world pretty much extended to the end of the hallway at Pershing Elementary School. I knew about the Russians, but did not understand the Cold War. I knew about “duck and cover” drills, but we never had them at my school. I also knew about video games, but out little Mac 512K-E was mostly limited to snake and shufflepuck. So when, as a kid, I watched 16-year-old computer David Lightman (Matthew Broderick, in his  pre-Ferris days) play a computer game of tic-tac-toe to save the world from nuclear annihilation…I was really confused.
I recently figured it was high time to give John Badham’s suspenseful cold war film another shot. Â And while the film doesn’t have the same social impact it once might have, it does remain an interesting look at a rather singular time in our history when the threat of nuclear war was not only real but, in the minds of many people, imminent. Â Lightman is a lovable slacker who smarts off to his teachers at school and spends his evenings and weekends at video arcades and hacking into computer systems with his monochromatic PC at home. Â And while this character could have been played by just about any teenage actor, it’s Matthew Broderick’s wide-eyed innocent charm that really sell the role. Â He’s on relatively good terms with his parents, he has an entirely innocent friendship with his classmate Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), and his hacking is mostly good-natured fun. Â He’s not out to ruin anyone’s day, it’s just that school bores him because he’s too smart for the system–and he knows it.
David Lightman: saving the world, getting the girl, and making it home in time for dinner.
When Lightman sees an ad for a new computer game, he tries to hack in to the company’s systems so he can play their game before it’s released to the public. Â Soon enough he comes across a computer system with a list of games like “Chess,” “Tic Tac Toe,” and “Global Thermonuclear War.” Â Thinking he has found a repository of top-secret computer games, he and Jennifer decide to try out the last game, pretend they are the Russians, and launch a volley of missiles at the United Stated. Â All good fun, right? Â Well, it would be except for one little detail: Â Lightman didn’t know it, but he had really found his way into a top-secret NORAD computer mainframe and had just flipped the switch on World War III.
Pretty soon all heck breaks loose. Â Baby Matthew Broderick is busted by the government and taken to the NORAD underground Top Secret Lair where military dudes with Texas accents and cigars the size of drain pipes are blathering about doomsday, barking out DEFCON status updates, and glowering at Lightman very sternly while telling him in no uncertain terms to stay put. Â Sure enough he breaks the heck out of there, gets his friend-girl to buy him a plane ticket home, and the two of them track down Dr. Stephen Falken, the creator of the WOPR military computer that is about to blow up the world, because he is the only one who can stop the madness. Â In the end, the fate of all civilization comes down to a gigantic game of Tic-Tac-Toe and the hope that if a machine can learn how futile nuclear war is, maybe we humans can too. Â Aww.
Don't laugh, folks. This used to be cutting-edge computer graphics.
Things are perhaps more than a tad predictable in War Games, but it’s a suspenseful movie with just enough coming-of-age moments for Lightman to keep us cheering for him. Â It’s a classic geek story with a likable, nerdy hero who gets the girl in the end, and despite some over-the-top performances here and there (not to mention the very idea of putting nuclear launch capabilities solely in the hands of a computer…*ahem* Â I’m looking at you, James Cameron), War Games is an enjoyable film whose message still holds up today, even if our cultural zeitgeist is more focused on terrorism than nuclear war. Â And it might not be long until the two become one and the same, so perhaps the message is in fact just as relevant now as it ever was…
Rating:[Rating:4/5]
X-Men
February 22, 2010 by
When I was a kid I used to watch Batman: The Animated Series after school while rolling up newspapers for my daily delivery route. Â I wouldn’t say I was a hardcore fan of the show, but I did appreciate its mature subject matter and often heavyhanded treatment of moral and ethical issues. Â Animated, yes, but far from a simple cartoon: it was an animated show that explored justice, morality, the dual nature of humanity and our need to create masks to hide our true nature. Â Along with Batman were shows like Gargoyles and X-Men that treated their audiences with a greater level of respect, and assumed a greater level of maturity, than typical after school animated entertainment. Â Sadly, I never got in to those two the same way I did with Batman. Â In fact, as deep as the Batman mythology goes, one could argue that the X-Men mythos is far richer and replete with many more metaphors and messages that are as relevant to our society now as they ever were. Â And it is this rich source material that director Bryan Singer, the mastermind behind the outstanding Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil, draws on for his big-screen adaptation of X-Men. Â For the most part, Singer succeeds in crafting a tight and engaging story that, despite the laundry list of characters and conflicts, manages to be not only entertaining but smart and full of delicious subtexts and metaphors for modern social conflicts. Â Even though the special effects sometimes get out of hand, and the movie sometimes takes itself a bit too seriously for its own good, X-Men is an enjoyable film for those who like their buckets of popcorn large and buttery as well as those who prefer to spend evenings philosophizing at coffee shops.
Cyclops, the X-Men frat dude, about to unleash some optical fury up in this grill.
Because I spent my afternoons while growing up watching the Caped Crusader instead of legions of mutants, I know virtually nothing about the history and mythology of the X-Men. Â I have never read an X-Men comic book, only rarely seen episodes of the animated series, and am for all intents and purposes an X-Men newbie. Â A movie like this is almost sure to get the fanboys out to the theatres (though beware the backlash lest the movie fail to live up to impossible expectations!), but to please (appease?) them and also appeal to people like me is a tricky proposition.
The story wisely focuses largely on Wolverine, one of the more complex characters in the X-Men universe, and to a smaller degree Rogue, a young girl with the (often unfortunate) ability to take powers from other people or mutants simply through physical contact. Â Wolverine’s mutant ability to heal himself, combined with his ability to extend metal claws from his knuckles, is a far cry from Storm’s ability to alter the weather, Mystique’s talent for shape-shifting, or Cyclops’ powerful laser eyesight, and it is this ability that allows casual viewers like myself to connect with the main character on a personal level. Â The same goes for Rogue: Â we see her accidentally send a young man into a coma when the two of them share their first kiss, and this helps us not only understand the depth of her character but connect with her on an emotional level as well. Â She runs away to Canada after this incident, meets up with Wolverine in a seedy bar, and begins to form a friendship that serves to define their characters throughout the rest of the movie.
The relationship between Xavier and Magneto is wonderfully deep and complex--a far cry from Good Guy vs. Bad Guy.
Ultimately this is why Bryan Singer’s X-Men succeeds where it could have just as easily failed: Â Singer focuses first and foremost on the characters, using special effects and big-budget action setpieces when necessary to the story as opposed to the other way around. Â And perhaps the most interesting of all is the relationship between bad guy Magneto (Ian McKellan) and good guy and X-Men savior Professor Xavier (Patrick Steward, fantastic as usual). Â Singer eschews the traditional insane-megalomaniac-bent-on-world-domination caricature in favor of a Magneto who, because of his childhood experiences in Nazi concentration camps, sees only the worst of what humans are capable of doing–especially to those who, like mutants, are different. Â When Senator Kelly (Bruce Davidson) introduces a bill effectively forcing all mutants to declare themselves, and their powers, to the authorities, Magneto puts in place his plan that will essentially turn all the world leaders into mutants. Â Xavier, with his team of mutant good guys, must put a stop to this dastardly deed before it’s too late and the human/mutant conflict escalates into a war.
It’s a premise that can only exist in a comic book movie, to be sure, but in the capable hands of Singer the movie never devolves into comixploitation or cartooney violence just for the sake of it. Â In fact, the story actually focuses too much on the characters–there are so many humans, good mutants, and bad (or just misguided) mutants to keep track of that the movie gets a little too convoluted for its own good. Â Between love-triangle jealousy, character backstories, political wrangling, treachery and deceit, and Ray Park’s stuntman acrobatics, it’s a heck of a lot to process in just two hours. Â And the climactic battle on the Statue of Liberty is actually a bit of a letdown–it would have been great to see an all-out brawl between Magneto and some of the X-Men, rather than having most of them sit around, helplessly locked up until Cyclops accidentally saves the day. Â The script is also a bit too heavy for its own good, with some of the cheesiest dialog this side of Episode 2. Â After all, this is a comic book movie, not Shawshank Redemption, so maybe Singer could have eased up on the seriousness level a few times.
Rating:[Rating:4/5]
