here do you a start with a flick as jam-packed and haphazard as this one? You could accuse it of having too many mutants – but the whole attraction is watching mutants whiz around doing cool mutant shit. The story comes up short, but when every scene’s a set piece, who cares that there’s not much to tie them together? Plots, subplots, and mutants great and small fly across the screen for over two hours, and once in a while something even clicks. It’s a mess, but I won’t lie: I looked forward to seeing it, and I got about what I expected.


The movie pretends to have a central message – namely, that discrimination is a bad thing. It kicks off by talking about human evolution: after millenia of regular old homo sapiens running the globe, recent mutations have created a new species of humanity that has incredible superpowers. Humanity has reacted to this new minority with fear and suspicion, and this movie’s bad guy, General Stryker (Brian Cox), is a military scientist determined to wipe them all off the planet. Meanwhile, the good guys – the X-Men – ally with a more militant group of mutants to stop him.


The mutants are supposed to stand for the oppressed minorities in the real world. But it’s hard to buy that when the mutants all come with superpowers that let them control the weather, bend any metal and blow holes through walls. You’d be hard-pressed to picture a concentration camp for mutants lasting more than five minutes – although the movie doesn’t even take it that far, avoiding any ugly imagery of mutants being bashed outside dance clubs on “mutant night,” or slaughtered in Eastern European genocides.


Meanwhile, the far more interesting side of the problem – that some of the mutants want to fight back – is only ascribed to the villains, and the movie publicity about “how we should all learn to live together” ignores the more radical message, where the “bad” mutants decide to turn the tables and try to kill off humanity instead. Ian McKellen’s Magneto puts a charming, complicated face on this preemptive genocide but the movie doesn’t treat him as anything but plain-old “evil.”


But the comic book that spawned this movie was more character than idea-driven, so my only real gripe here concerns the way Singer handles his mutants. The giant ensemble cast could work if he focused on even one or two of the main heroes. The first movie belonged to Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and to some extent Rogue (Anna Paquin), who are the most interesting mutants. Jackman, definitely the star, fights with such primal rage that the thousands of cuts, gunshots and blows he suffers seem real even when he heals almost instantly. And Paquin has our sympathy as the alienated teenager who can’t touch another human being without sucking the life – and the mutant superpowers – out of them.


This time, the rest of the team gets equal time, and let’s face it: most of the mutants are duds. James Marsden would be anonymous as Cyclops even if he weren’t stuck behind a gigantic, eye-covering visor; Halle Berry as Storm still can’t make her lines sound good, and I don’t even know what to make of the one-dimensional Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who can lift a jet plane with her mind – though stupidly, not when she’s safely inside the damn thing.


Compared to Wolverine and Rogue, whose powers are closely bound to their identities, most of the mutants just stand around while the special effects do the work. Flip through the publicity photos for the movie and you’ll notice several shots of people just standing with one arm purposefully outstretched: that’s all the actors get to do while they’re controlling the weather, summoning balls of fire or blowing the shit out of everything in sight. Their powers also overwhelm the story, which has too few moments of genuine suspense: instead of trying to solve puzzles with a clever use of their abilities, the mutants just take turns blowing their way through each problem with brute force. This also ratchets up the absurdity of the premise: take Professor X (the underutilized Patrick Stewart), who can read and control people’s minds. We discover that Professor X has a machine with which he can find and kill anyone, anywhere in the world, with just the power of his brain. And these guys are the underdogs?


Sure, most people don’t care if a few things don’t make sense in a dumb pre-summer action movie. But imagine what Singer could have done with the right story and the right mutants. There are many scenes that are beautifully taut: the frenzied disorientation of Nightcrawler’s assault on the White House; the elegance of Magneto’s prison break; every scene with Hugh Jackman. These are the moments that the movie should aspire to - where we can watch real characters in extraordinary circumstances, with special effects that bring them to life instead of obscuring them.