X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Strangely enough, I’ve somehow managed to avoid watching most of the series since starting these reviews. But this last weekend, I’m getting an oil change at one of those lightning fast, don’t-even-leave-your car joints. The guys doing the oil change were talking about superhero movies, and I just joined right in. One of them says this was the best of them all, and I was hard pressed to disagree. So it went near the top of my list to re-watch.

Did I Like It: It’s not hard to say that this is probably the best of the X-Men films*. It manages to weave together many of the elements that made X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) some of the early entries of the superhero boom, and the later films that managed to refresh the series with X-Men: First Class (2011). It even manages to avoid the particularly baffling multiple timelines that weighed down the series as it wore on… Mainly because this is the film that drove the timelines off the tracks.

But then again, as one of America’s fine purveyors of time travel nonsense, I fully approve of even that much.

It also helps that this film largely works. It may not be the bubbly 60s spy movie homage of First Class or the subtle homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)** that is X-Men United. It does owe a lot to The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and it may be the fact that at the moment I’m watching the Dirty Harry films, but Hugh Jackman has been spending the last twenty-five years just doing an Eastwood impression? It’s a pretty good one, sure, but… folks. That’s all he’s been doing.

That all reads like I’m picking at nits, but there were things that I found oddly affecting on this re-watch. And it only kind of has to do with the fact that the whole plot focuses on a megalomaniacal titan of the tech industry (Peter Dinklage) yanking a little too hard on the ear of the president (Mark Camacho) to bring us all to our inevitable doom.

All right, maybe it’s a bit more than kind of, but there’s other stuff here. I’m mainly focusing on the lost Charles Xavier as portrayed by McAvoy. He’s selfish and broken in a world where the only rational response would be to be selfish and broken. Who’s the only man in the entire multiverse who can set him right? The older, wiser Xavier as portrayed by Patrick Stewart. Hell, if I can’t have my future self set myself on the right track, I’d take any number of characters played by Patrick Stewart.

*If one ignores Logan (2017). We’re not going crazy here.

**I’ll die on this hill, but I probably won’t elaborate on it, unless I need to beef up the word count of this review.

X2: X-Men United (2003)

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming

Have I Seen It Before: Ha. I’m oddly proud of the fact that I opted to go see this at the expense of going to my senior prom*. I remember so vividly that I went to the film with somebody who then worked with me at a grocery store. After the film, he declared that the film was a Christian parable, especially the scene where Bobby Drake/Iceman’s (Shawn Ashmore) parents won’t accept him and ask him if he had tried not being a mutant.

I didn’t quite have the heart to tell him what it was an obvious allegory for, especially as he seemed to like the film well enough.

Not a month goes by where I don’t think about the fact that that dude was technically my date for senior prom.

Did I Like It: Here’s the wild thing. If my moviegoing companion had focused on Nightcrawler’s (Cumming) story, he might have had a point. It can be a lot of things to a lot of different people, apparently, and never feel weighed down by everything its trying to do.

That doesn’t even cover the fact that every objective element is improved upon the original, a film that itself largely works. The action is more sure of itself, the scope of the story more epic, and the cast of characters embrace further corners of the source material that the original film seemed borderline ashamed of (even if it objectively just couldn’t afford to let its mutant flag fly).

Then there’s the fact that this is objectively one of the most apt homages to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) I’ve ever seen. Honestly. Play the last few minutes of both films side by side. They very nearly sync up.

*Yes, I’m aware I could go to both in a single day, or even a single weekend. The first time I saw Spider-Man (2002) was immediately after the junior prom, but I figured I would only re-create the portions of the evening that worked.

Superman Returns (2006)

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Kevin Spacey

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. What else was there to do in 2006?

Did I Like It: I like Superman Returns. I think in many, many ways it is a throwback to another era of blockbuster spectacles, made at a time when every superhero film looked and felt like each other. Also, given that it turns out in addition to being a horrible sexual predator for decades, he is also one of the more undisciplined filmmakers produced by Hollywood in recent memory. Given his inherent sloppiness as a director, it’s a miracle any film he’s ever been associated with came together in any coherent way. That it is also a strangely personal film from a child of adoption about parentage and coming to grips with ones origin makes it worth at least some praise.

But I also dislike a lot of what is going on with the film. In fits and starts, it reaches to be the missing third movie in the Christopher Reeve series. I, too, have an affection for Superman (1978) and its sequel, so it’s slavish devotion to the work of Richard Donner is appreciated. It just doesn’t go for broke on the attempt. John Williams’ march is back in fine form, refrains from the planet Krypton make occasional cameos, and we even get a few tastes of “Can You Read My Mind,” and thankfully, no one takes a crack at a spoken-word rendition. But the musical motifs for Lex Luthor (Spacey, more ick easily available) are completely new and utterly bland. The failure of the score is made all the more frustrating by the fact that the new cues are courtesy of frequent Singer collaborator John Ottman, a composer whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past. 

The space zoomy opening titles are straight out of the Donner films, Marlon Brando is conjured into the film using footage left over from Superman II, and the Fortress of Solitude that informs the film’s MacGuffin is straight out of John Barry’s original production design, but made impressively more alive by the special effects of the time. But the visual trappings stop there. Singer could have gone for broke and had this film look like a product of the late 70s and early 80s. Instead, it’s obviously a film made in the mid-2000s, and had abandoned all hope of being timeless halfway through opening weekend.

Brandon Routh gets short shrift as the title character. He’s since proven himself an amiable presence on TV, and here he equates himself better than we all remember with the imminently unfair task of “being Christopher Reeve.” Kate Bosworth, on the other hand, not only channels nothing of Margot Kidder, she also practically sleepwalks through the role of Lois Lane, a choice which really should have put her at the bottom of the casting director’s list of potential choices for the role.

The film is just too flawed in key ways to fully recommend, and yet can’t be completely dismissed, either. Both the production of the film, and my reaction to it, are ultimately exercises in half measures.

X-Men (2000)

Director: Bryan Singer*

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Anna Paquin

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, gosh. The memories. With driver’s license freshly in hand, this was the movie I first went to see under my own power. My, how far we’ve come. I am, of course, looking in your direction, Dark Phoenix (2019).

Did I Like It: There are, of course parts that don’t age so gracefully (see that footnote), but by and large the things that were done on purpose in this film work, while the things that are simply a reality of when and under what circumstances the film was made, not so much. But then again, I’m thinking that way back in the last year of the old millennium, the ratio of things that work to those that don’t probably stayed about the same. 

If Toad (Ray Park, living his best life in the late 90s/early aughts, to be sure) stole Cyclops’ (James Marsden) visor during the fight at the train station, why does he have it back as they head to Liberty Island? I mean, I guess, he has spares… But, still.

Now that the one true nitpick I have for the film is out of the way (excluding any toads struck by lightning), let’s get to the heart of the movie. And it is truly in the heart where this series is launched with the best of intentions. As an action movie, it is a product of it’s time, trying to echo some of the sensibilities of The Matrix (1999), but only managing to mimic, not capture the leather-clad wire-jumping spirit of that film. The plot is also insubstantial to the point of floating into the wind under the slightest scrutiny. It’s a 90s movie at the beginning of a decade that wanted something else. We’d have to wait for the sequel for the series to fully deliver on that promise, and another fifteen-or-so years for it to squander that promise and go out with a whimper.

And so the film is left with casting and the interplay between the characters. Here, it is successful. Patrick Stewart reaches his cinematic destiny, bringing all of his stern, yet patient leadership (and GOAT sitting in a chair skills) as Xavier. Ian McKellan might have seemed like an odd choice to play Magneto (in fact, the sort of Adonis-like Michael Fassbender seems more on-point), but he plays the man vacillating between compromise-averse crusader and egomaniacal tyrant with a deftness that any lesser actor may have whiffed. Anna Paquin… Well, there’s something about Anna Paquin’s Rogue that reminds me of thoughts I might have had as a younger man, that might be unseemly now, although they would have been age-appropriate at the time. Let’s just say that she inhabits the vulnerability of the role fully, and I really like scarves.

And then there’s Hugh Jackman, who arrived as if from nowhere in this film as a fully-formed movie star. He almost didn’t have the role, and it’s hard not to think of how bereft Dougray Scott must feel at having just missed out on what would be a 17-year franchise and a career as one of the most bankable movie stars of all time. It might be reductive to say Jackman glowers around the film like a young Clint Eastwood, but his magic is in the interaction with the other characters. His absolute infatuation with Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) feels real, his big-brother affection for Rogue is earned in every frame, and I absolutely believes that he just doesn’t care for James Marsden.

Is this a thin film in retrospect? Probably. But it delivered on the things that could work in an X-Men film, and left the stuff that didn’t have much of a hope of translating for later entries in the series.

*It’s just going to be ugly to have to watch his credit come up in films from here on in. It is of some small comfort that, in retrospect, some of his best films may have had less to do with his contribution than we might have been previously led to believe.