Xmen, days of Boresville

I will be churlish and vaguely spoilery here, just so you know.

My chief complaints are, in no order:

*Everyone was so terribly, tiresomely earnest. Except Quicksilver, who was hilarious and delightful and then not in the movie anymore. Dour dour dour. You have to assume the true purpose of the Sentinels was crushing humor everywhere. The mutant population simply became collateral damage. “Mr. President, someone’s about to get off a zinger in here…” ZAP! DIE!!

*I get that a major point of these films is that Professor X and his obvious slash interest are young and inexperienced. Not yet the men they will one day become. Yay, good message! We get better as we get older. But as starting points for growth go, this is really sad. What we get here is Doctor Whiny versus someone who ODed on Stupid Pills. I love Mystique, but the fact that she runs rings around Charles and Eric is hardly satisfying. If the two of them tried to pull off a doughnut run in this movie, they’d come home with one spilled and cooling hot chocolate, five bales of wheatgrass, and a half-eaten box of baby Cheerios. “Sorry,” they’d say. “We were about to pay for crullers and bear claws and then Magneto decided that the deep fryer guy was giving in to his fear and hatred of the other.”

*Serious Bechdel Fail, unless you count Mystique as Peter Dinklage talking to an unnamed clerical worker about her scarf.

*The Sentinels (presumably by design?) looked like a mash-up of the rampaging Tony suits in Iron Man 2 and the Guardian from Thor Primo. Why?

*Magneto. A hacker? In the Seventies? What? Using railroad ties? What? Were they made of fibre optic cable and laced with the spirit of Neo? I mean: Come on! They weren’t all, “ATTENTION MUTANTS: I HAVE METAL COOTIES! I MUST COMPLY!” No, they flew in formation. They obeyed his voice commands. Do Sentinels get Stockhold Syndrome? Why isn’t Philip K. Dick around to write us all the answer?

*For eff’s sake, show some guts, Marvel! If you want to give us Charles as an IV drug user imagery, go for it and damnwell make him a heroin addict.

I could go on just about forever. I’d not have taken a chance on this–I knew there was a high chance of cineloathing. But the reviews were glowing and people seemed to have liked it.

Jennifer Lawrence performed well. Raven’s journey was lovely and if they’d cut about 90 minutes of crap from all around it, there might have been an okay story in there. Charles has a couple quasi-believable epiphanies, though I’d rather they’d been facilitated by Wise Mature Logan rather than Future Charles. You sell yourself short, Future Wolverine.

This emperor is buck naked, folks. Two and a half hours of watching the kittens wrestle while I tumble-dried the bedspread they peed on yesterday would have been a better use of my time.