X-2

‘X-Men’ left much unresolved, not least the Cyclops-Jean-Wolvervine triangle, the enigma of Wolverine’s background, and matters concerning the mutant-bashing Senator Kelly, last seen being impersonated by Mystique. ‘X-2’ picks up the political thread of the narrative with an opening sequence which automatically establishes it as a classic of its kind. In a kinetic display of both editing and CGI that still looks the biz 13 years on, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), a mutant seemingly acting alone, infiltrates the White House, gives any number of Secret Service guys the run-around, breaches the Oval Office and comes damn close to filleting the President.

This, needless to say, puts the government in a bit of tizzy and paves the way for Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) – a man who might as well have “military-industrial complex” tattooed on his forehead – to influence policy and target the mutant community to his own ends. Stryker’s hatred of all things X has a provenance closer to home than he’d probably care to admit.

Meanwhile, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has done some digging into his amnesiac past but come up with nothing and returns to Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart)’s academy still champing at the bit that Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) remains committed to her relationship with Cyclops (James Marsden) when he’d prefer to be playing hide the mutant salami with her. Meanwhile, Rogue (Anna Paquin) is trying to kickstart a romance with Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) a.k.a. Iceman, though Ice-moody-teenager would be an arguably better name. 

‘X-2’ skirts the pitfall marked “soap opera” but expertly avoids it (unlike, as we shall see, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’). In fact, the handful of twee character interactions that returning director Bryan Singer sprinkles the first twenty minutes with only serve to emphasise what’s at stake when the plot kicks into high gear, Stryker’s men launch an assault on the academy, and the all-powerful Cerebro – the machine by which the already telepathic Xavier can locate and track all mutants – falls into the wrong hands.

Meanwhile, Magneto (Ian McKellan) – last since incarcerated in all an-plastic prison – finds an ingenuous (if slightly cheat-y) means of escape, and reunites with Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). That Stryker, who has by this point captured Xavier, also has designs on Mystique finds himself the enemy of both the suddenly leaderless X-Men and the already antagonistic Magneto. The stage, to use an old expression, is set.

‘X-2’ is a mammoth leap forward from the admittedly accomplished first instalment. There’s much more action – the Oval Office opener; the attack on the academy; Pyro (Aaron Stanford) cutting loose on a SWAT team (his temperamental nature is something Magneto soon plays on); and an extended finale in Stryker’s secret base – but the characters remain the focus. Speaking of which, the new characters are by and large interesting (again, something that ‘Last Stand’ doesn’t always manager) and the arcs of most of the existing characters are at least slightly extended.

Wolverine remains the focus, certainly for the action set pieces, while Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean Grey get a bit more to do this time round. Berry seems more comfortable with the character. The interplay between Stewart and McKellan remains a joy to watch, while Romijn-Stamos once again bags a (wo)man of the match award for the sheer glee with which her sinuous and deadly Mystique walks away with the film everytime she sashays onscreen. Brian Cox is also awesome as all hell but – hey! – that should be obvious: he’s Brian Cox, motherfuckers, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else delivering a line lik “I was piloting black ops in the jungles of North Vietnam while you were sucking on your mamma’s titty at Woodstock” with such spine-crawling relish. Kudos, too, to Alan Cumming, who makes Nightcrawler creepy, dangerous and somehow dignified pretty much all at the same time.

The backgrounding of Rogue, however, becomes more problematic. She’s given one thing to do in the big finale – land a plane – and she does so with such deer-in-the-headlights panic that it’s difficult to reconcile the Rogue of the movies with the Rogue of the graphic novels. (The worst is yet to come, however, so I’ll save my big Rogue-wuz-robbed rant for the next review.)

The franchise’s touchstone of alienation is given a good workout in this instalment. The idea of mutants as outcasts – social pariahs – is there in Rogue’s inability to engender a “normal” relationship; in the pieces of Wolverine’s backstory that begin to edge into place; in Pyro’s acceptance of Magneto as a father figure; and in Iceman’s betrayal by his own brother. A scene where Iceman’s parents first assure him that “you’re still our son” and then wonder “have you tried not being a mutant” establishes an analogue so self-explanatory that I don’t need to belabour it here.

‘X-2’ is what a superhero film should be: exciting, engaging, possessed of visual panache and a sharp wit; but a film, between all the effects and smackdowns, that grounds itself in who its characters are and what is truly at stake for them. It’s the film in which all the promise of ‘X-Men’ coheres. The ending – in which the shaky alliance of its protagonists with their arch-nemesis Magneto splinters under the latter’s megalomania, and which points to the emergence of Jean Grey’s Phoenix persona – seems to set up a third instalment with the potential to up the ante even further.

Then it all went wrong …

X-Men

Assuming you’ve been conscious and paid even the remotest attention to popular culture during the last decade, you might have come to the conclusion that your local multiplex exists solely as a delivery system for Marvel films, that there has been an overwhelming glut of superhero movies. But the superhero movie has been with us a lot longer than that; and when Bryan Singer gifted the world with ‘X-Men’ fourteen years ago, the genre was on pretty shaky ground.

Tim Burton’s gloriously stylised ‘Batman’ (1989) and ‘Batman Returns’ (1992) had, under the less-than-guiding hand of Joel Schumacher, devolved into the by-the-numbers tiredness of ‘Batman Forever’ (1995) and the flat-out awfulness of ‘Batman & Robin’ (1997). Superman spent the 90s mired on the small screen and it wouldn’t be till 2006, in the bloated ‘Superman Returns’ that he’d see the inside of a movie theatre again. Meanwhile, ‘The Shadow’ (1994) peddled a nice 30s vibe but failed to engage audiences, and ‘The Phantom’ (1996) gave us Billy Zane in purple and a poster with smeared with the useless tag line “slam evil”.

Then came ‘X-Men’ (2000) and the superhero genre got its shot in the arm. Singer had already made a name for himself with ‘The Usual Suspects’, the outright best of the half-decade long slew of post-‘Reservoir Dogs’ cooler-than-thou crime capers. His follow up, an adaptation of Stephen King’s psychologically chilling novella ‘Apt Pupil’, was perhaps too aloof in its execution, but it saw Singer working with Ian McKellen for the first time, and if there was a better actor he could have cast as Magneto in ‘X-Men’ … but what the hell am I talking about? McKellen is Magneto.

‘X-Men’ starts off in grim, muddy fashion – you can tell the director of ‘Apt Pupil’ is at work here – as a seemingly endless line of bedraggled prisoners are shepherded into one of the Nazi death camps. A young boy is separated from his family. He fights as much as his strength will allow as a cluster of guards drag him away. Then another kind of strength erupts from him: as he flings out his hand, almost like a demented conductor, the huge iron gates twist and buckle. A rifle butt lays him out, but the damage is extraordinary. And unnatural.

Put simply, this was about as far from George Clooney’s Batman and Chris O’Donnell’s Robin skating through Mr Freeze’s hideout as it was possible to get.

The next scene is an exercise in contrast: a leafy, privileged surburban home, an all-American girl – Marie (Anna Paquin), later to take the name Rogue – flirting with her boyfriend. They kiss; she almost drains the life from him. Disconsolate, outcast, Marie hits the road. She finds herself in a bar at the arse-end of nowhere. A bar where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is picking up some ready cash cage-fighting. The fight over, the cash pocketed, Wolverine hits the road in his pick-up truck. (Rootlessness and marginalisation are strong themes throughout much of the franchise.) Rogue hitches a lift. En route to nowhere in particular, they’re attacked by Sabretooth (Tyler Mane), who turns out to be in the pay of Magneto (Ian McKellen).

Magneto and his blue-skinned henchwoman Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) have a plan to strike back at a government initiative – spearheaded by the oleaginous Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) – to further disenfranchise a mutant population already regarded with fear and suspicion by the general populace. Magneto’s plan involves Rogue’s particular “talent”.

Long story short – and ‘X-Men’ packs a lot of characters and exposition into its slender (100 minute) running time – Wolverine and Rogue end up at an academy run by wheelchair-bound Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), former comrade of Magneto. From the off, they’re opposite sides of the same coin: Xavier the idealist and Magneto the reactionary. Singer’s genius was in casting Stewart and McKellan – their chemistry is palpable, the way they play off each delightful to watch. The script (by Singer, Tom DeSanto and David Hayter) is literate and wryly funny. The pace is brisk even as great chunks of information are lobbed out.

And yet … and yet …

For all that I love ‘X-Men’, it’s never seemed entirely complete. In some respects, it feels like it ought to be an origins story (the concentration camp scene certain piques that expectation), bringing the team together and establishing the Xavier/Magneto conflict, yet only Magneto is given any real backstory. That Xavier is basically thrust onscreen as a fully-formed character is something that only works because of Stewart’s gravitas as an actor. Elsewhere Wolverine and Rogue seem to be the principle focus by which the viewer is guided through the groves of Xavier’s academy, with the likes of Cyclops (James Marsden), Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) given only the briefest of introductions before they’re thrown together to combat Magneto.

It’s worth mentioning that the franchise’s increasing focus on Wolverine can be plotted against how little it does with Rogue (she becomes less and less interesting as a character throughout the arc of the initial trilogy), which seems an absolute waste of Paquin’s talents. It’s also worth mentioning how tin-pot Magneto’s operation seems to be – far fewer resources than Xavier has at his fingertips, and even less manpower – and it says everything about McKellan’s performance that he makes Magneto a genuinely dangerous character despite only having a nude polymorph, a brainless thug and a couple of abandoned buildings to work with. 

Nor does the film particularly trade in big action set-pieces: sure there’s Magneto flipping police cars with a dismissive gesture of the hand (I love the way McKellan orchestrates scenes of chaos and destruction as if he were conducting a delicate piece of chamber music), and some hand-to-hand in and around the Statue of Liberty, but on the whole ‘X-Men’ is more interested in character. Which, ironically, emphasises the inadequacies in characterisation that render Storm, Jean Grey and any number of others as ciphers rather than integral members of the team. Janssen does well with virtually no material, already establishing the dynamic between her relationship with Cyclops and the immediate attraction to Wolverine which will inform the next instalment; but Berry looks lost much of the time. The unlikeliest candidate for a good performance – former model Romijn-Stamos – ends up walking away with every scene she’s in: her Mystique is serpentine, calculating, seductive and sexually mocking in a way that Jennifer Lawrence hasn’t yet been able to capture in the franchise’s new timeline.

It’s not often you can say of a tent-pole superhero movie that it could have done with being longer; such is the case with ‘X-Men’. It’s entertaining, stylish and freighted with a cast who, for the most part, gel very effectively given how much of an odd mix they present. But it still seems like three-quarters of a movie: a curtain-raiser that kept back its final act for development as a sequel.

BOND-A-THON: Die Another Day

I’m only guessing, but I reckon the first script conference for ‘Die Another Day’ went something like this.

The writers: Okay, here’s the deal. It all went a bit OTT in ‘The World is Not Enough’, so what we want to do is really scale things back. Shit-can the gadgets, ditch the one-liners, keep it real.

The producers: Sounds good. Did you get the memo about the invisible car, by the way?

The writers: Uh, I think we missed that. But, hey, what we propose is this: subvert the audiences’ expectations. Have a gritty, down ‘n’ dirty pre-credits set piece that ends with Bond being captured. Totally pull the rug out from under the viewers.

The producers: Cool. Great attention-grabber. Can you work in the invisible car by the half way mark?

The writers: Uh, the emphasis is supposed to be on Bond living on his wits. We want to keep the gadgets to a minimum.

The producers: Absolutely. Invisible car, watch that shoots a laser. That’s two by our reckoning. Oh, and you know what else would be really cool? An ice palace!

There are a lot of things wrong with ‘Die Another Day’, not least that it acronymizes as ‘DAD’, but the thing I have the most problem with is the god-damn stupid motherfucking invisible car. When I watched ‘Die Another Day’ for the purposes of this review, I played the DVD through the laptop, headphones on, rather than insult the TV with it; and on several occasions Mrs F had to break off her RPG and ask me to rant a little quieter and make with less profanity. By the end of the movie, her astute observation was: “Anyone would think you had issues with the invisible car.”

And you know what, dear reader? I do. The invisible car is a god-damn stupid motherfucking concept on many levels, the most obvious being that it brings to mind Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. You know, the one that looked like this:

Keep that image in mind. Now here’s 007 (Pierce Brosnan) in his invisible car:

To my mind there are only three differences: (i) ‘Wonder Woman’ was made nearly thirty years before ‘Die Another Day’; (ii) ‘Wonder Woman’ had a notably smaller budget than ‘Die Another Day’; and (iii) despite her epic cleavage, Wonder Woman looks considerably less of a tit than Bond in a straightforward comparison of these two images.

Yes, I have issues with the car.

I also have issues with the shitty CGI in the scene where toffee-nosed uber-villain Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) cuts loose with a giant laser, melting vast swathes of tundra as Bond dangles off an ice cliff. Bond escapes this combined fiery-watery fate by surfing his way to freedom. These are some choice examples of the images the paying audience is fobbed off with:

What makes it worse it that ‘Die Another Day’ opens with a surfing scene that’s dramatic, atmospheric and kicks off one of the absolute best pre-credits sequences in the entire Bond canon. I’m tempted to call it ‘The World is Not Enough’ Syndrome, except ‘TWiNE’ gives us a world-class pre-credits sequence then nosedives into redundancy, like a priapic sybarite suddenly experiencing brewer’s droop. ‘Die Another Day’ gives us a frankly pretty damn impressive first three quarters of an hour: Bond’s hovercraft duel with Korean warlord Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) and subsequent capture – awesome! Bond’s torture, imprisonment and exchange for the terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) – awesome! Bond’s less-than-victorious return to MI6, the revelation that he’s been implicated in a terrorist outrage and M (Judi Dench)’s fears that he’s been brainwashed (a nod to the opening chapters of the novel ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’) – awesome! Bond breaking ranks from MI6 and going renegade in order to clear his name – awesome! Bond hooking up with American operative Jinx (Halle Berry) as he pursues his own agenda without sanction or back-up – awesome!

I remember sitting in Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema ten years ago, rubbing my hands in gleeful delight as the first third of ‘Die Another Day’ played out, convinced that even the trademark Brosnan pout wasn’t a drawback and that I was watching the most pared-down, focused and hard-edged Bond since Connery was sipping the martinis.

And. Then. It. All. Went. Wrong.

No: it didn’t just go wrong. It went disastrous. It went cataclysmic.

How bad? Well, I think I’ve already mentioned the invisible motherfucking car and shit-awful surfing scene. In addition, there’s the horribly conceived ice palace – the most obviously studio-bound bit of tundra since John Sturges’s production designer painted the floor white and arranged some bits of polystyrene at strategic angles for ‘Ice Station Zebra’ in 1968. There’s a tediously contrived fistfight between the randomly shifting patterns of some laser beams. There’s a cluster of dreadful performances, from John Cleese as the new Q (he was introduced as Desmond Llewellyn’s protégé in the previous film but wasn’t as egregiously annoying as he is here) to Toby Stephens who doesn’t so much chew the scenery as go ‘Man vs Food’ on its ass, while Michael Madsen mopes around in the background, mumbling and waiting for the cheque to clear. There’s a denouement that made me die a little bit inside to watch.

And there are endless – endless – references to other Bond movies. ‘Die Another Day’ was released forty years after ‘Dr No’ and was the twentieth film in the franchise. As such, it was obviously deemed a sterling idea to reconfigure the script as a join-the-dots exercise in homage. Thus we have: Jinx emerging from the sea in a Honey Ryder style bikini right down to the knife belt and a reappearance by the Duke of Wellington portrait (‘Dr No’); Rosa Klebb’s shoe inexplicably showing up in Q’s lab and a potential blackmailer filming Bond in a clinch from behind a two-way mirror (‘From Russia with Love’); Jinx almost eviscerated by a laser, an ejector seat fired from Bond’s Aston Martin and a fight in a depressurising plane (‘Goldfinger’); the old jet pack in Q’s lab, an oxygen mouthpiece used by Bond in a diving scene and a clinic wherein a villain’s appearance is changed (‘Thunderball’); a disused section of the underground commandeered as a secret service base (‘You Only Live Twice’); Bond temporarily buried under an avalanche (‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’); diamonds used to finance a satellite with destructive capabilities (‘Diamonds Are Forever’); Bond using a big American handgun at one point (‘Live and Let Die’); M maintaining and office on board a ship and a satellite that can harness solar rays (‘The Man with the Golden Gun’); a union jack parachute and a similarity in design between the ice palace and Stromberg’s undersea lair (‘The Spy Who Loved Me’); a sword fight through an opulent building in which a fuckload of expensive things are inordinately trashed (‘Moonraker’); the theme song artiste (Madonna) appearing onscreen for the only time since Sheena Easton (‘For Your Eyes Only’) and actually graduating to a speaking part here; the crocodile submersible and mini-jet in Q’s office (‘Octopussy’); Bond surfing in the Antarctic (‘A View to a Kill’); Bond as sniper and a protracted fight in a transport plane, vehicles being jettisoned out of its rear cargo hatch (‘The Living Daylights’); and Bond going rogue after M rescinds his Double-O status (‘Licence to Kill’). Recyclings from Brosnan’s previous outings include a falling chandelier that kills an antagonist – reminiscent of the metal sectioning that similarly finishes off a bad guy in ‘GoldenEye’ – as well as a timer being set for three minutes; the replication of the car park chase in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ around the different levels of the ice palace; and the sprinkler system that activates after Jinx booby-traps the clinic in Cuba, akin to the aftermath of the bomb attack on MI6 headquarters in ‘The World is Not Enough’. Additionally, the gadget-laden watch Q issues Bond with is described as “your twentieth, I believe”.

Some of these homages are, to be fair, quite neatly done and – ironically – the best of them has nothing to do with the movie franchise (the character name Colonel Moon, an inversion of ‘Colonel Sun’, the first Bond continuation novel after Fleming’s death). Mostly, however, they are as subtle as Oddjob lobbing his steel-lined bowler hat at a statue. Cumulatively, they leave you feeling bludgeoned by the filmmakers’ commitment to self-congratulation over aesthetic development; their determination to rake over past glories rather than striving to create a new classic. We’d have to wait four years for that.

Robots

Three years ago, I wandered half-heartedly into a screening of 'Robots' with a friend of mine, our choice of film a second best after the preview screening of 'Constantine' that we'd got ourselves hyped over proved to be sold out.

Okay, we thought, so there's this young robot who leaves his parents and heads off for the big city, all full of dreams and ambitions, only to find that things aren't as he imagined them. But he has his friends. And he has integrity. And he has heart. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Lachrymose, morally trite kiddie-fare, right?

Au contraire. 'Robots' turned out to be the funniest, cleverest, most brilliantly realised (both narratively and visually) piece of animated film-making I'd seen since 'The Incredibles' (my immediate thought was that Blue Sky, the people behind 'Ice Age', looked set to give Pixar a run for their money). Of course, it wasn't too long before Pixar came out with 'Ratatouille' - up next in the 100 faves project - and reminded everyone who might have been remiss enough to have forgotten that they pretty define animated film-making.

But back to 'Robots' ...

The vocal cast is top-notch: Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Greg Kinnear, Robin Williams, Jim Broadbent, Mel Brooks, Amanda Bynes and Paul Giametti. The look of the film is fabulous: a fully integrated world of delightful retro stylisations which subtley reference everything from 'Metropolis' to 'Forbidden Planet'. The in-jokes cover just as broad a spectrum, a spot-on '2001: A Space Odyssey' send-up rubbing shoulders with any number of 'Star Wars' homages (I seem to recall that the 'Episode III' trailer was shown with 'Robots').

The narrative clips along at a fast enough pace to prevent the under-fives from getting bored, but director Chris Wedge and his screenwriters invest time in the characters, a decision that pays dividends when the idealistic Rodney Copperbottom (McGregor) and his plucky band of friends are outnumbered by the villains at the end. The climactic fight (oh yes, it may be U-rated, but 'Robots' contains scenes of "ass-whupping") is a bravura set-piece, managing to generate real tension, while at the same time firing off throwaway gags in all directions: one minute it's 'Braveheart' revisited, the next there's a Britney Spears song and dance number ... then it's back to the dust-up.

An hour and a half after slumping sullenly into our seats, me and my friend came exited the cinema beaming, in agreement that 'Robots' was a delightful, hilarious discovery. A week later we got round to seeing 'Constantine'. Oh dear, oh dear. We exited that one wondering why it is that the imagination, wit and attention to detail which Hollywood lovingly applies to films made ostensibly for children is so often absent in the productions it tailors to an adult audience.