X-Men Review

Bryan Singer's real decision was to shrink the comic down rather than inflate it. Six mutants matter, the finale has one location, and the whole thing moves through in a hundred and four minutes, a discipline the genre abandoned almost immediately afterward. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen give the argument its weight, and McKellen in particular plays Magneto as a man whose logic you can follow all the way to the end without flinching. Hugh Jackman arrived late as a replacement and found the entire character in the way Logan refuses to look at anyone.

Against that, the film looks cheap and grey. Newton Thomas Sigel lights the Statue of Liberty climax like a television pilot, the black leather costumes photograph as rubber, and Toad and Sabretooth exist only to be thrown into things. Halle Berry is stranded, handed an accent she quietly abandons and one line about lightning that has been quoted for twenty-five years for the wrong reasons. What holds is Rogue and Logan, two people who cannot safely be touched, which gives the fighting something to be about besides the fighting.