The X-Men
The characters of your favorite comic come to life, but they left the plot in the books.
By Matt Lamas

One of the first scenes in the Xmen is a standoff between Charles Xavier and Magneto. They are discussing there unsolvable disagreement. Xavier wants to save humanity, Magneto to destroy it. As your watching you think to yourself, wow, they've really captured the spirit of the comic books. Unfortanately, the rest of the movie never hits this level again. The plot point is just used to give the characters their initial motivation but is never really dealt with in any depth again. The movie just develops into a typical super hero action movie with action scenes and a gloss of characters. Some the scenes are exciting to be sure, a standoff between Magneto and Xavier with dozens of floating guns is particularly good, but it doesn't add up to much. If you've never read the comic books you will find the characters particularly sketchy, and the whole movie feels like the pilot for a new tv show.

I can't say that I didn't enjoy certain parts of the Xmen, but I sure expected a whole lot more. Most characters only had cursory motivations for anything they did, and when they weren't fighting each other the plot wasn't good enough to keep the pace going. No matter what review I write, if you like the Xmen comics you'll see this movie anyway. I know I would have no matter what I heard about it. Just don't expect too much.