Exploiting paranoia
Mark Steyn
X-2: X-Men United 124, selected cinemas
Unless you're one of those hardcore anoraks still subscribing to The Incredible Hulk in late middle-age, most of us like the superhero comics we grew up with. If, for example, you were a boy in the 1940s following Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain America as they fought for truth, justice and the American way, you're never going to be too keen on the 1960s version of Captain America, riddled with self-doubt, brooding incessantly on whether he's a living anachronism, haunted by feelings of ambivalence over Vietnam, etc., etc.
On the other hand, even if you dig Stan Lee's 1960s Marvel Comics heroes with their various hang-ups and neuroses, you may find the whole thing's got a bit out of whack these days. The first X-Men film was far too solemn for a story whose evildoers are so straightforwardly evil they call themselves the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and include among their ranks a guy called Toad, whose superpower is that he's super-servile and can unfurl a tongue several feet long, the better to reach his boss Magneto's butt from across the room.
But Bryan Singer's movie eschewed such unworthy thoughts, concerned mainly to demonstrate its reverence for four decades of Marvel backstory and thus establish its bona fides for fans. In doing so, it managed to lose the quirky spirit of the original. Singer has re-calibrated for X2: X-Men United, perhaps under the influence of the more successful Spiderman, and we now have displays of fun uses of mutant powers in the cafeteria and several jokes about the complications of mutant sex. There is also the chameleon-like Alan Cumming as a lizard-tailed, Teuton-accented, Bible-belting mutant refugee from a Munich circus still going under his carnival name, Nightcrawler. And there's a wonderfully Stan Lee-esque sequence in which Iceman comes out to his parents and reveals that he is a practising mutant. 'We still love you, son,' says the sympathetic suburban mom as they talk things over in the living room — and then, sweetly, 'Have you ever considered, well, not being a mutant?' The sting and the awkwardness of the forced parental tolerance lingers through the ensuing and otherwise conventional shootem-up with the local cops.
If you don't already know who Professor X and Magneto are and what their quarrel's about, well, this film isn't going to be much help. It's a sequel that's all but incomprehensible without the first movie. So the question is: what's in it for the average non-X-groupie? As that coming-out scene makes plain, in its ongoing saga of super-gifted societal outcasts X-Men is a brilliantly direct pitch to the average adolescent's twin feelings of alienation and uniqueness. In the Sixties, it was also said that the conflict between Professor Xavier, the good mutant, and Magneto, the bad, mirrored the respective approaches to civil rights of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Now Singer has retooled the X-Men for our own time. He opens with an assassination attempt on a not unBushlike President. Hmm, This is an America where the people live in fear of the mutants who dwell among them mainly because they are different! Exploiting this paranoia, the Administration has introduced a Mutant Registration Act, which is clearly racist, or specie-ist or whatever. But now this attack on the White House will give them the excuse they wanted for an ever tougher crackdown on mutants.
Singer seems to have made a movie that complies with the general post-9/11 'climate of fear' thesis advanced by Tim Robbins and other Hollywoodentops. To be sure, the mutants include a small minority of evildoers, but the vast majority are peaceful and law-abiding. Indeed, in X-2, there aren't really any good or evil mutants, since Magneto and his shapeshifting sidekick Mystique have pretty much given up on the old evildoing and are fighting side by side with Professor X against the real bad guy: an evil American general. Well, there's a novelty. This time the evil general is General Stryker. Say, wasn't Sergeant Stryker the name of the character John Wayne played in The Sands Of Iwo Jima? Coincidence, no doubt. This Stryker is another red-blooded military man, but it turns out he staged the assassination attempt so that the President would give him carte blanche to wipe out all the mutants.
So the X-Men are a sort of League of Moderate Muslims, and the evildoer they're up against is John Ashcroft. I don't think it's a good sign when a movie about the bestselling comic book of the past 20 years turns into just another conspiracy thriller with sinister right-wingers. After two bites of the apple, Bryan Singer is beginning to look like a guy who can't quite bring himself to believe in the source material. The reluctance to use anybody's supermoniker is one symptom: Jean Grey (Famke Jansson) started out as Marvel Girl and later switched to Phoenix, but here she's just 'Jean Grey'. The decision to dispense with the long underwear is another sign: I still like the original blue and yellow spandex costumes, dramatically modified over the year, but Singer junks the lot in favour of drab black leather that leaves everyone, regardless of superpower, looking like a motorcycle courier who's lost his wheels. Nobody who genuinely loved superheroes would do that to them. The exception is Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who plays the shape-shifter Mystique. I can't say Miss Romijn-Stamos's shape is in much need of shifting, particularly as she spends most of the movie dressed in a kind of skintight slime that makes it look as if she's just emerged from the pit on Lesbian MudWrestling Night at the local sports bar.
Other than that, the high-toned theatrical Brits hog most of the honours — Patrick Stewart's Professor X. Ian McKellen's amused Magneto, Brian Cox's John Ashcroft or Sgt Stryker or whatever he's called. I would love to see a comicbook movie in comic-book colours that knew — as Marvel always did — how to tell a story. In Singer's hands, you never feel there's anything at stake. In this XMen, you spend the first few minutes wondering Y and by the end of the laboured finale you're going Zzzzzzz. Next time, more spandex, please.
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