ORBzine Movie Reviews August 2000
by Speculator.
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Tony Todd [ Candyman pops up to explain it all. They were all fated to die on the plane; fate is catching up with them and killing them off, one by one. The Feds exceed their mandate, and harass him in the hope of fitting him up on some trumped-up charges. This is an extremely well-scripted film, and puts Scream to shame. It was written by Morgan & Wong of X-Files fame, and is more or less an X-Files story with a bigger budget and no Mulder or Scully.
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X-Men
As comic adaptions, this one is more like the
Judge Dredd
movie than the
Robocop
one. It is certainly better than Batman and Robin [which is not saying
much]
The film starts in 1944, when a young boy sees his parents taken away by Nazi stormtroopers. We flash forward to the current day, when a US politician [Bruce Davison] puts forward the view that Mutants are too dangerous to be allowed to mix with normal humans. He draws a parallel with gun control. Patrick Stewart plays Professor Xavier [prounounced ex-avier], leader of a Mutant vigilante group called the X-Men. Xavier's answer is segregation! The young boy from 1944 has grown up to become Ian Mckellern's character, arch-villain Magneto. The hero is Wolverine, played by relative unknown Hugh Jackman. He was second choice for the role: they originally wanted Dougray Scott, but he was unavailable because he was called back to do reshoots on Mission: Impossible II. Wolvie meets up with a teenage mutant girl [ Anna Paquin ], and the 2 of them are attacked by Magneto's henchmen. Famke Janssen plays Jean Grey, and James Marsden is Cyclops. The only real attempt at character development is a half-hearted love triangle between Wolvie, Jean Gray and Cyclops. Why not an interracial romance with Storm [ Halle Berry ]? She has nothing to do for 95% of the film. She looks great in her skimpy white t-shirt, though - they missed the chance for a running joke where everyone who meets her tells her great rack! McKellern's sidekicks include martial-arts star Ray Park [ Phantom Menace, Sleepy Hollow ] as Toad and supermodel Rebecca Romajin-Stamos in her feature-film debut as Mystique. The plot demands that the good guys are remarkably thick. The villains try to kill Wolvie - yet everyone assumes they want him alive. The plot is cliched, with a race against time and no pay-off. The climax, what there is of it, involves using the skills of all the team. How blatantly predictable. Contrast this with the show Charmed , where one of the team has to learn new skills [kick-boxing].
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One of the teenagers has a dream straight out of
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