X-Men
Subversive, Substandard Subtext
The great and good Ben Stein (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) once suggested that Hollywood make a movie about the civil rights movement. The movie would show the pervasive and invidious discrimination against African-Americans, the marches, the victories in courts and legislatures, and the sheer moral courage of everyone from Rosa Parks and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Freedom Riders on down. It would be a wonderful movie about hope and leadership and vision and the progress made by society in the last forty years.
“Nah,” Stein said. “Let’s make another movie about how racist and evil and bigoted we are, instead.”
Well, the latest in that string of movies is Bryan Singer’s X-Men, a dim-witted political fable dressed up as an expensive, special effects-laden summer movie. X-Men tells the tale of America’s latest oppressed minority group; mutants. Apparently, in the not-so-distant future, the cosmic forces have aligned in such a way that a chosen few have received mutant superhero powers. (Expect the Human Genome Project to announce, any day now, that they’ve found the gene for ice breath or for weather control.)
Some of these mutants have the altruistic courageous superhero gene, others have the evil gene. (The evil gene has very powerful side effects, such as poor planning, megalomania, stilted dialogue, and a need to surround oneself with incompetent henchmen.)
There is no earthly reason why X-Men couldn’t have been a perfectly good movie about the battle between the good and evil mutants. However, the real villain of X-Men isn’t a mutant but a Senate backbencher. Bruce Davison, best known for his role in… um… um… just a minute… Seinfeld? Hunter? (I actually thought, for some reason, that Bruce Greenwood had this part; he would have been much better.) Anyway, he plays Senator Kelly, who picks up the mantle of Martin Dies, Joe McCarthy, and Dan Burton and starts campaigning for a Mutant Registration Bill. (We’re never told what’s in the bill, presumably, it’ll add another line to the Census long form or something.) Anyway, Senator Kelly represents all of the poor misguided racist bigots out there who don’t believe in civil rights for mutants, and we see a few extras here and there carrying signs and screaming slogans, representing the mass of the rest of us who just aren’t enlightened enough about the confidentiality of genetic testing.
With the right screenplay, the subtext could have been handled cleverly and more obliquely. Instead, the political subtext ends up subverting what could have been an entertaining action thriller, turning it instead into a jarringly bad waste of time.
Our villain is Magneto, a Holocaust survivor with the mutant power of controlling metal. Like all evil mutants, he has an evil plan, and the meat of the movie is the question of whether the X-Men will be able to squash it in time or not.
The evil plan is the centerpiece of certain types of action movies, and it’s had a bad decline in recent years (everywhere except for the Pinky and the Brain cartoons). The rise of the bad evil plan happened sometime between the last good anti-Communist movie, The Hunt for Red October, and The Fugitive, which revolved around FDA approval for a new cardiac drug. In between, we had such outrages as a James Bond movie about the routing of an oil pipeline in Turkey, another pharmacutical caper in Mission Impossible: 2, the revival of the U.S. Postal Service in The Postman, the multiple asteroid attacks from the summer before last, Godzilla, and other silly plans for world domination too numerous to name. Not to mention, as exemplia gratia, the fake invasion of Albania in Wag the Dog that led (sort of) to a bombing of a aspirin plant in Sudan to distract attention away from a real-life presidential sex scandal, or the horribly impenetrable machinations of the Trade Federation in the new Star Wars movie.
X-Men has one of the worst evil plans in the past decade, and that’s saying something. Magneto, you see, has built a machine that can turn ordinary mortals into powerful mutants. His plan is to use this machine in a giant consciousness-raising exercise. Apparently, there’s a big multi-nation world summit on Ellis Island, and Magneto intends to turn all of the world’s leaders into mutants. Presumably, this is a Bad Thing, although we’re never told why. Think of the possibilities. Think about what a Secretary of Agriculture or the President of Morocco could do with the power to control the weather. Think about how Tony Blair would look with giant green antennae. Think about what would happen if the Chairman of the Federal Reserve could control interest rates with his mind. (OK, maybe you don’t have to think about that last one too hard.)
My point is, to the extent that I have one, that this is a pretty shallow evil plan. For one thing, it represents identity politics at its worst. For another thing, what, exactly, does Magneto think this will accomplish? You would think that a mutant President would veto a Mutant Registration Act, but that’s no guarantee that it wouldn’t be overridden. Besides, Magneto and his cohorts don’t seem like the law-abiding type, anyway, and its hard to see how a Mutant Registration Act would cramp their style. (When they outlaw mutant powers, all the powerful mutants would be outlaws.) Plus, all of the mutants seem to have unlimited cashflow; why couldn’t Magneto just make some campaign contributions?
(Note: The last two comic-book movies I completely enjoyed were Blade — which features the hero stealing Rolexes from dead vampires for funding — and Men in Black, where the MiB agency “invents” Velcro and microwave ovens to stay in business.)
I am overanalyzing here. Clearly, X-Men doesn’t want or expect anyone to explore these areas of illogic. When X-Men focuses on what it ought to be about — the origin and actions of its heroes — it’s perfectly all right. Patrick Stewart, for one, is perfectly cast as Professor Charles Xavier, the psychic leader of the X-Men. Hugh Jackman is crisp and smart and lethal as the tough-but-tender Wolverine, and Famke Janssen and James Marsden adapt themselves nicely to the characters of Jean Grey and Cyclops. Anna Paquin is a charming bundle of teen angst as Rogue, who drains the life force out of anyone whose skin she touches; despite the worst Southern accent of anyone since Keanu Reeves in Devil’s Advocate. Only Halle Berry feels tacked-on as Storm, who can control the weather.
The evil mutants are much less fun. Wrestler Tyler Mane is monosyllabic as Sabretooth, the heavy. Supermodel Rebecca Romijn-Stamos all but disappears behind her blue body paint as shape-shifter Mystique, and martial arts expert Ray Park does yeoman’s work as the disgusting Toad. However, they’re there primarily to get punched around, which they do in a rock ‘em sock ‘em battle in the Statue of Liberty gift shop.
X-Men answers the question; what’s dumber than a dumb summer movie? Answer: a dumb summer movie that pretends that it’s smarter than it is. With a better evil plan and less attention to the political subtext, X-Men could have been the best movie of the summer. As it is, it’s substandard fare that only rises past the level of the ordinary in the rare fight scene. Hopefully, the inevitable sequel will pay more attention to action, romance and adventure and less attention to the politics of mutation.
(P.S. So far, I haven’t referenced the X-Men comic books in my review, the same way that I didn’t mention “Scientology” in my review of Battlefield Earth, or “horrible waste of time” in my review of Shaft. Suffice it to say, that after reading one X-Men review too
many complaining that some character or another from the comic wasn’t in the movie, or referencing comic-book inside jokes having to do with yellow spandex, I decided to write this review completely independently from its graphic-novel origins. I am not a comic-book reader; never have been. If you loved the X-Men movie based on your appreciation for the comic books, well and good. If you hated the X-Men movie based on its failure to live up to those selfsame comic books, well and good. Either way, if you want to comment about this review in the context of the comic book, you might as well keep it to yourself, because I’m not going to know what the hell it is you’re talking about. Thank you for your support.