X-Men (2000)
This movie was made 14 years ago. It is difficult to let that settle in at all. This movie still has effects that stand up to some of the best out there today. The ham-fisted attempts at melding computer generated graphics with live action that I saw in both of the new Spider-Man movies is nowhere to be seen here. Instead, we get good animation and better storytelling. Yes, there are some physics issues and Wolverine's claws can't decide if they slice without issue or generate friction, but the whole thing comes across as an opera with mutants.
I remember hearing that Sir Patrick Stewart was going to be Professor X, and my immediate thought was that this movie might actually be good. Until then, I had only been a periphery fan of the X-Men comics, as there are so many characters, that it's hard to get invested in one in particular.
Speaking of getting invested in one character, what the hell happened to Cyclops? He's supposed to be the leader of the X-Men, but he come across as more of a nothing. James Marsden plays the character well enough, but it's like he's setup to be Bella in the Twilight movies - he exists to be a template where you can potentially imagine yourself in there with the real X-Men, but you don't really have a pivotal role.
Sir Ian McKellen is predictably the other great standout in this movie. That guy is old and shouldn't be as cool and suave as he comes across, but he brings such acting chops to his characters that you can't help but not hate him, even when he's doing terrible things. It doesn't hurt that his character was written so well.
If this movie suffered from drawbacks, they mostly lied in the sheer number of characters that Marvel tried to shoehorn into the movie. I don't blame them, as they didn't even bring the whole crew from the comics, but there are still a lot of them with powers that are unclear or undefined or irrelevant. Even the ones with great power seems to use them sparingly or without any kind of expertise.
4.5/5
X-Men: X2 (2003)
It's hard to follow up a good first act with a good second act. I wouldn't have blamed them if they decided to phone this movie in by having the good actors show up, throw some CG at it, and call it a day. What they actually produced was a well-scripted movie with good control over their characters and solid direction.
Even the new characters and actors that they introduced for this movie like Lady Deathstrike and Nightcrawler are fairly well developed (or at least enough) what with all of the other goings-on in the movie. I go back to my earlier comment that X-Men is more of an opera than anything else - some would call it a soap opera, what with the constant tension between Wolverine and Jean Grey.
In this movie, we see even more of Wolverine's fascination with Jean, but we also start to see an actual personality start to bloom within Mystique; not too much, mind you, but we see some. It's odd how her character develops over these movies - she pretty much winds up being window dressing in blue latex.
Also introduced to be a bad guy (a human) is Brian Cox. He is another fantastic British actor, and it's a pretty big win to have him in here at all. Just glancing at the list of actors at this point should make anyone impressed. The number of individual actors who could carry a film all by themselves is more impressive than any of the Expendables movies - and this scale is using actual acting talent. I mean, holy crap, Halle Berry is essentially an extra.
4.25/5
X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2006)
And... the run ends. Bryan Singer is out, and Brett Ratner is in as director. As a result, all hell breaks loose, and the franchise gets driven into the ground with a convoluted storyline, drawn out scenes, one-dimensional new characters, and many over-the-top heaps of crap.
Famke Janssen is supposed to be a tragic character in this movie, but it's impossible to think anything but bad things about what should happen to her at any point. All of the main characters seem to be struggling to either bring her back as the old Jean or set her free as Phoenix, but I just kept hoping she'd get hit by a bus.
The main thrust of the movie is about the creation and distribution of a "cure" for mutation. It's all based on a particular mutant whose power is the ability to suppress mutations around him. It's unclear how they generate the "cure" or how it works, but the whole thing is eerily similar to the liquid that Striker used in the previous film to control his mutants. It was also sourced from another mutant - so I guess the idea is that mutants are their own worst enemy.
Anna Paquin is in this movie for like a minute. She was one of the focal points of the previous two movies, but she is pushed to the back of the story never to be heard from again. Nightcrawler? Nope. Don't know what happened to him, but they must have figured there were enough blue people in the movie with the addition of Beast, so they tossed him.
2.25/5
BONUS ROUND!
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Screw this movie! My wife has no experience with the comic books that these movies were based on, so she had no expectation level, and she declared this movie as her favorite. It might be a good movie, but I can't see past what they did by neutering Gambit and Deadpool - freaking Deadpool!
See, Deadpool exists for one thing: smart-ass comments. Let's look past the fact that Ryan Reynolds should clearly never be in any superhero film ever - we learned that lesson from Green Lantern. Let's just consider taking the character's defining characteristic of mouthing off and remove his mouth. What an idiotic move, and it makes me mad just thinking about it.
Aside from that, we are 9 years from when the first X-Men came out, and Wolverine has started to get ... veiny. It's odd that he was muscular in the first movie, but he wasn't over-the-top defined. It was a nice, realistic if not out of reach for most men physique. Hugh Jackman needs to avoid the over-indulgence of working out that lead Sylvester Stallone to have to keep his arms covering his cheat for the last Rocky movie, as his veins were distended and distracting. Oh, and don't get me started on the stupid, unbelievable CG claws that are actually worse in this movie than the ones that came before it.
The Superman movies showed us that constantly adding powers to your superhero was stupid and ultimately killed the franchise. When Logan is in the tub getting injected with superheated metal, he also somehow manages to hear Striker talking in a room overlooking the warehouse-sized room that Logan is in... when did he get super hearing? You know what? Screw this movie.
1.25/5