"Marie" (aka "Rogue" - Anna Paquin) really does know how to suck the joy out the relationship with her boyfriend, so runs away and hooks up with "Wolverine" (Hugh Jackman). Both of them are on the radar of the evil "Magneto" (Ian McKellen) so the benign "Dr. Xavier" (Patrick Stewart) dispatches "Storm" (Halle Berry) and "Cyclops" (James Marsden) to fetch them back to his school for the gifted. Here, he is able to train these powerful mutants so they are prepared to take on the megalomanic baddie. "Magneto", in turn, is intent on dealing once and for all with humanity, and it's intolerance of the whole of mutant-kind. This is very much an establishing film for a series yet to come. The backstories and identities are built up so we understand who is who, and why they are behaving as they do - and that includes the nervous humans led by "Sen. Kelly" (Bruce Davison). I'm not sure if it's search for mass appeal (it's rated 12) compromised it too much, but for the most part this is all just a rather procedural excuse for some long combat scenes and some special effects based around some handsome people in the cast. To be fair, there are a few fun rivalry scenes between Jackman and Marsden (though luckily no yellow spandex) but Stewart is just "Picard" in a wheelchair and though McKellen offers a more substantial effort as "Magneto", even he doesn't really have much by way of decent dialogue to get his teeth into. Indeed, the writing is really pretty lame throughout. It is a good film to watch, especially on a big screen, but let's hope the series storylines mature a bit for the next one.
