BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Freddie Mercury was a superlatively talented and charismatic musician who lived a raucous, dangerous life.  He was a bold artist - his pop videos referenced Njinsky, and Fritz Lang and leather clubs - he gave a white hair band a provocatively queer name - he was both in the closet and out - he's one of the most famous victims of AIDS but only admitted he'd contracted the disease late.   And more than that, Freddie remains fundamentally opaque.  He didn't talk much about his private boarding school childhood in India, hundreds of miles from his parents in Zanzibar. He didn't talk much about how they felt to be transported from wealth and warmth to suburban London, and how he felt as a gay teenager of strict Zoroastrian parents, whose religion forbids homosexuality.  Do we really know why he went solo in the early 80s?  Do we really know why he returned to the band?  Do we know how he felt when gay friends starting dying of AIDS, whether he took precautions or altered his behaviour, or how he felt when he succumbed?

No. And this is not the film to tell us either.  Instead, what we have here is a sanitised, banal, paint by numbers biopic that does no justice to the audacity of its subject, or the interest of his fans. It's all surface. All staged set-up. There's barely a conversation that doesn't show a simplistic version of how some hit song was written. This is the stuff of pantomime villains and white-washed heroes.  Most insultingly, the film portrays Freddie as unaware he was gay until the late 70s, as basically straight laced until led down the path of danger and disease in the 80s by the villlainous parasite Paul Prenter (Allan Leech - DOWNTON ABBEY).  Even when he does come out to his parents in an absurd last minute hook up with Jim Hutton on the DAY OF LIVE AID!!! there's no confrontation or consternation. It's all just tied up nicely with a bow so that the stakes can be at their highest for that concert. Oh yes, and he supposedly also told the band he was dying just before it and was worried his voice wouldn't hold up.

This is all palpable bollocks of course.  And one would've hoped that the surviving members of the band would've been better than settling old scores with the original reviewers of BoRhap, or the original record producer who wouldn't put it out as a single.  One might even have hoped that they would be more honest about their shagging and drinking, let alone Freddie's, rather than just the odd sly comment about Roger Taylor's extra-marital affairs.   And for heaven's sake, could any of this have been done with slightly more subtlety that the leaden dialogue by THE QUEEN's Peter Morgan and Anthony McCarten? Seriously this was little more than an afternoon TV Movie of the week.

The only thing that saves the movie - I'm afraid to say as he's apparently a despicable man - is Bryan Singer's visual styling - particularly an opening dynamic walk through the backstage of Live Aid, and a lovely shot that takes us into the band's tour bus. 

Rami Mallek doesn't act - he does an impersonation. A very good one of Freddie's accent and physical performance.  But he struggles with his prosthetic teeth and an impersonation is NOT a holistic acting performance. That said, Freddie and Queen were just so bloody good, that even seeing an impersonation  inspires a lot of nostalgia and feel-good singalong warmth.  But that doesn't make this by any stretch of the imagination an awards-worthy film.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It is on global release.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is a long and convoluted film. That it remains engaging says something for the quality of the cast it has assembled, the ballsiness of its premise and the elegance of its action scenes.

The movie sees Wolverine sent back in time to the 1970s by Kitty Pryde to persuade Professor X and Magneto to come together and prevent Mystique from being captured by an evil inventor called Trask.  He will create robots called Sentinels who use Mystique's own mutated blood to become the ultimate Mutant killing machines.  If she isn't stopped Mystique will unleash a future in which Mutants are all but extinct.  But the mission isn't an easy one. Wolverine has to persuade a disillusioned, drugged up Professor X to help; he has to bust Magneto out of prison for killing JFK; and that's before he even gets to Trask.

The cast is impeccable. Fassbender vs McAvoy as Magneto vs Professor X is just the ultimate buddy movie with consequences.  You need actors will real heft to pull of a man scarred by the Holocaust and another who has to go back into his wheelchair for the good of humanity.  Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman on the brink of a massive ethical decision. The new additions are Peter Dinklage as the bad guy, Trask, fine but nothing spectacular, and Evan Peters as Quicksilver. (Yes, you're right - a different Pietro Maximoff to the one in AVENGERS....)  Peters doesn't have much to do, but he does star in the most awesome action sequence of any X-MEN movie to date, in which he goes so fast the reality around him slows down and he literally re-arranges bullets in the air.  Amazing scoring for that scene too. As for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, well, he's played Wolverine so many times by now I almost don't think of him as acting anymore.

The heart of the film is the relationship between Mystique and Magneto.  Is he going to stay good or go bad?  And between Charles Xavier and, well, the world. Is he going to give in to depression or grasp the future, the future he can create?  It's this more than anything else that keeps us coming back to the franchise.  It's not just ever bigger and bolder action sequences but that these are grown up, complex, scarred characters that wrestle with their doubts and dissatisfactions. There are no easy choices. Everything carries weight. Everything matters.  That's what elevates X-MEN, and this instalment in particular, to something very special indeed.

X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST has a running time of 131 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

VALKRYIE - superficial conspiracy procedural

VALKYRIE is a straightforward conspiracy procedural about Claus von Stauffenberg's failed assassination of Hitler and anti-Nazi coup. Given that we all know the bare bones of the story, it's laudable that writer Chris McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer manage to sustain tension. Indeed, when Stauffenberg gets back to Berlin, convinced that Hitler is dead, and starts convincing territories to join his cause, I almost believed that the SS might capitulate to the sheer force of Tom Cruise's personality. In particular, I really like the fact that McQuarrie manages to open up the movie from being about an assassination to the wholesale seizure of power - a far more difficult feat.

Where the movie fails is in its ham-fisted, clumsy dialogue. Lines like, "To understand National Socialism, you must understand Wagner". The movie also has a tendency to slip into kitsch. Note the fetishistic treatment of Stauffenberg's glass eye. Would Stauffenberg really have put his glass eye into a glass of whisky to summon the attention of Fellgiebel?

I was also a bit disappointed that Singer didn't have more ambition. To say that this movie basically succeeds as a B-movie is to admit that Singer hasn't even bothered to make a more psychologically involved film. After all, the key point of this movie is that in a country where decision-makers were too self-interested, weak-willed, callow and drunk on power and ideology to make a stand; a small group of men did. Why them? Yes, Singer and McQuarrie do hint at Stauffenberg's faith as a driver, but what about his sense of obligation as an aristocrat or his political views? This movie raises more questions than it answers.

VALKRYIE is on release in the US. It opens on January 22nd in Australia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea and the UK. It opens on January 28th in Belgium, France, Russia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on February 12th in Egypt, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Singapore, Brazil, Estonia and Poland. It opens on February 20th in Denmark; February 27th in Italy; March 12th in Croatia; and March 20th in Japan.

Bryan Singer retrospective - X2 (2003)

What comes after a massively commercially successful comic book adaptation? Why, the sequel of course! And basically all my comments regarding Singer's X-MEN go double for X-2. In general, Singer does a fine job in creating a slick, entertaining summer blockbuster movie full of spectacular set pieces. At the same time he remains faithful to the original books. Without the need to do all the character establishment heavy lifting, Singer even has room to develop characters and emotional relationships. The love triangle between Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine is developed and Singer sensitively introduces the Jean Grey/Phoenix theme. Singer even gets to probe the intellectual heart of the books with a classic scene in which a teen mutant called Iceman "comes out" to his family. Best of all, the classic conflict between "good" and "bad" mutants is complicated by the insertion of a human arch-villain called William Stryker (Brian Cox) - hell-bent on mutant genocide. Cox is yet another impressive actor added to the roster, and more than makes up for the sub-par performance from Halle Berry and the fact that Cyclops is once again short-changed. The same flaws persist - too many characters, too much material - but it's hard to pin them on Singer. Indeed, despite the proliferation of characters, he does as well as one can imagine in still crafting a coherent movie.

All in all, X-2 was a stylish, entertaining, intelligent comic book movie - a more satisfying feature than the already impressive X-MEN.

X2 went on release in 2003.

Bryan Singer retrospective - X-MEN (2000)

After the brilliant USUAL SUSPECTS and the interesting but directorially rather anonymous APT PUPIL, Bryan Singer hired himself out for the first in the X-MEN franchise. The resulting movie was slick, full of spectacular special effects, and had a convincingly dark and brooding look and feel. It established a high water mark for comic book reimaginings that would only be broken by Christopher Nolan's BATMAN BEGINS. To that end, X-MEN represented a return to form, and proof that Singer could handle different types of material - carefully balancing commercial and critical requirements. That said, the movie still had its flaws - namely that the plot is smothered by the need for spectacle and the amount of time it takes to establish the back story of all the different characters. 

To quote my review of LAST STAND: the basic idea "is that there are a bunch of people in the world who are mutants, with special psychic or physical abilities. The world of "normal" people is understandably nervous at having such powerful people in its midst. The mutants react to this fear in one of two ways. The "good guys" try to control their powers and use them only in ethical ways. They are led by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). But another group, led by Magneto, take a more Werner Herzog view of the world. They believe that the natural order of human-mutant relations is aggression and cruelty. The conflict between these two camps forms the back-bone of every X-MEN movie, usually triggered by some half-assed action on the part of bigoted "normal" humans." In this film, the half-assed bigoted action is requiring all mutants to register with the state - a move that spooks Magneto (Ian McKellan) - who lost his family in the Holocaust. In turn, Magneto decides to abduct Rogue (Anna Paquin)- a teen mutant who can leach other's powers - and use her in a bid to turn all the world's leaders mutant, thus rendering their discriminatory policies unthinkable.

Bryan Singer was brave to take on this movie. X-MEN books are some of the biggest selling of all time, which means that there's a vocal and rabid fan-base just waiting for you to trip up. BUT you have to balance the fan-base's desire for accurate details with the demands of the non-fans who still need to understand and engage with "another" summer blockbuster with spectacular action set-pieces. A second challenge - and certainly a bigger challenge than re-imagining BATMAN or SUPERMAN, is that X-MEN has an unwieldy cast of characters, each with their own particular back story that needs to be fleshed out, underneath the wider umbrella mythos. And a third challenge is that X-MEN is intellectually richer than most comics - explicitly discussing bigotry, political accountability and - and that doesn't always sit well with the special effects set-pieces and compressed run-time of your typical summer blockbuster.

Given these triple challenges how did Bryan Singer fare? Well, on the first call, the movie garnered both critical acclaim and commercial success. He pleased fans by remaining loyal to the original books - characters made it to the screen largely in tact and the screen-writers mined the rich history of the books for plot lines. The movie went on to spawn two sequels and rumours of an X-4 and WOLVERINE spin-off. To that extent, Singer established the franchise against all odds. The second challenge was to fill in the back story of the book and make all the characters intelligible to the non-fans looking for summer thrills. Here, I'd say that Singer only half succeeded. He successfully established the basic idea of the X-MEN but establishing the back stories to all the significant X-MEN takes forever and they are more or less short-changed by a cramped script. Only Wolverine comes out with anything like the appropriate screen time. As to the third challenge, the intellectual substance of the book has little room to play out given the pressures of establishing character and still fitting in a spectacular end-sequence. Nonetheless, it's clear that we are dealing with issues of prejudice and McCarthyism and than Magneto and Xavier present two reactions to that - broadly speaking an activist/passive stance that some have likened to the difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Singer wasn't fully successful on this count either but had at least succeeded in setting up an interesting debate between both sides of the argument.

X-MEN was released in 2000.

Bryan Singer retrospective - APT PUPIL (1998)

After the award ceremonies and the commercial success of THE USUAL SUSPECTS everyone was waiting to see what director Bryan Singer would do next. The weight of expectation bore down heavily on his 1998 flick APT PUPIL, which is a tremendous shame, because while it's no pantheon movie, it looks weaker than it objectively is in comparison to THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

The movie is based on a novella by Stephen King in which an intelligent teenager called Todd (Brad Renfro) realises that an old man called Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellan) in his neighbourhood is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Rather than shop the old man to the cops, Todd decides to exploit the him, trading silence in exchange for lurid stories of concentration camps. Todd thinks he's the dominant partner in this twisted relationship, trying to humiliate Kurt by making him wear an SS uniform while he drills him. But as Todd's fetish grows, Kurt becomes the dominant partner, as he can choose to feed the addiction or not. Moreover, Kurt is now posing as Todd's grandfather, covering for Todd at school as his grades are now suffering. The power game is reversed.

All of this makes for an intelligent and frightening psychological thriller. The problem comes in the final reels when the two-handed character study is shoe-horned into a lurid and somewhat unnecessary ending. It's as if the film-makers thought that the movie needed some action - some sort of genre conformist ending. The only other thing I would say about APT PUPIL is that what makes it still worth viewing are the two central performances and the original conceit by Stephen King. I was disappointed then and now by the fact that Bryan Singer hadn't given the material a particular visual style or indeed any other kind of directorial thumb-print. APT PUPIL struck me as a movie made by a director-for-hire rather than an auteur.

APT PUPIL played Venice and Toronto 1997 and was released in 1998 and 1999.

Bryan Singer retrospective - THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1994)

Bryan Singer's latest movie - VALKYRIE - will be released in the UK next month - an opportune moment to review his previous movies. I haven't written about any of Singer's movies before despite the fact that his 1994 flick THE USUAL SUSPECTS is one of my favourite films of all time and one of the few movies that I own on DVD. I love THE USUAL SUSPECTS because it proved that it was still possible to make slippery, haunting thrillers in the manner of those 1940s classics - full of real men, complex heists, bent cops and ambiguous loyalties. The script was intelligent and gripping, with just enough allusion to the supernatural to be frightening but still credible. The visual style was bold and captivating. The acting was superlative - and better still for introducing us to the soon to be iconic Benicio del Toro and reintroducing us to great character actors such as Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri. What was even more astounding was that the movie had been directed and written by a team of relative unknowns - Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie - collaborating again on their second flick - both still in their twenties.

The movie grips you from the opening scene - a harbour at night - a match flares showing the face of a battered, dying man, who voices enmity for a man with the unusual name of Keyser. The gasoline barrels on the ship catch fire - dramatically silhouetted against the sky. The central mystery has been established with admirable efficiency and style - who is Keyser - and what crime has been perpetrated here?

We cut to contemporary New York. "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey) begins his voice-over. He will be our narrator - fashioning our understanding of this tale. But we know he's a con-man - and that colours our belief in what he is saying. We see our group of suspects rounded up by New York's finest and interrogated, but it's clear they're innocent of this particular crime. Nonetheless, the personalities and the pecking order are established. Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) - the man we have just seen dying - is the alpha male. He's suave - he's was evidently trying to charm himself into a new legitimate life as a restauranteur. Trying and failing in the great tradition of movie mafiosi. Next comes Kevin Pollack as Todd Hockney - foul-mouthed, angry, clearly good at what he does and under no illusions about it. Then we have Stephen Baldwin - an unpredictable live-wire - as Michael McManus, clearly a partner in many senses of Fred Fenster (Benicio del Toro stealing every scene with his unintelligible accent.) All four have professional respect for each other as crims. Verbal Kint is the patsy - frightened - out of his depth.

Again, with remarkable economy we switch to intensive care where a cop is interrogating the survivor of the explosion on the ship - he's petrified and screams the name "Keyser Soze" again and again in heavily accented English. It's a truly frightening moment thanks partly to the exotic name, partly to the bandages. Either way, the film-makers have established a true sense of urgency and that the stakes are high.

And now we're into the meat of the story and we're hooked. Chazz Palminteri plays cocksure Officer Kujan, throwing every form of intimidation at Verbal Kint as he tries to work out what went down. In flashbacks, Kint tells his side of the story. It's a battle of wits - but three-way - between Kujon, Kint and the audience. Kint's telling us a tale of a heist gone wrong, a mysterious man named Kobayashi, murder and deceit. He's mixing it up with seemingly absurd details about barber shops quartets and suchlike. And he alternates between fear and arrogance. It's a bravura performance from Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for it.

Verbal: Where's your head, Agent Kujan? Where do you think the pressure's coming from? Keyser Soze - or whatever you want to call him - knows where I am right now. He's got the front burner under' your ass to let me go so he can scoop me up ten minutes later. Immunity was just to deal with you assholes. I got a whole new problem when I post bail.

Dave Kujan: So why play into his hands? We can protect you.

Verbal: Gee, thanks, Dave. Bang-up job so far. Extortion, coercion. You'll pardon me if I ask you to kiss my pucker. The same fuckers that rounded us up and sank us into this mess are telling me They'll bail me out? Fuck you. You think you can catch Keyser Soze? You think a guy like that comes this close to getting fingered and sticks his head out? If he comes up for anything, it will be to get rid of me. After that, my guess is you'll never hear from him again.

Kint's story ends without resolution for Kujan, who later discovers the true identity of Keyser Soze - surely one of the best twist endings in cinema. The brilliance of the script is that once you know the ending you can see the clues - it's not just willfully obscure. Moreover, my enjoyment of the film has not been diminished by knowing the twist at the end. Rather, every time I watch it I marvel at the ingenuity of the plot and I revel in the genuine feeling of menace and peril. To that end, THE USUAL SUSPECTS is the perfect marriage of style and substance. The movie looks great and feels eerie and has a cool ending but underneath all that it has a logical and whip-tight structure and fascinating power relationships - between the members of the gang and between the gang and the rozzers. All in all, a modern classic.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS played Sundance and premiered Cannes 1995. It opened in 1995 and 1996. Christopher McQuarrie won Best Original Screenplay and Kevin Spacey won Best Supporting Actor at the 1996 Academy Awards,

Smoking kills and Jesus loves me: what I learned from SUPERMAN RETURNS

Gosh, Mission Impossible III is looking better by the week isn't it? Actually, I don't really mean that. SUPERMAN RETURNS is brilliant in parts. Unfortunately those are all parts that are taken entirely from the Richard Donner classics starring Christopher Reeve as Superman, Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor. The director of this new version - Bryan Singer - brilliantly uses the old footage of Marlon Brando as Superman's daddy to open the movie. It gives us that epic, mythic, inspirational feeling that we need. And then, when you get that opening orchestral score by John Williams, I defy even the most cynical of film-goers not to feel like a ten-year old kid again. The set pieces where superman saves a crashing plane, or has bullets bouncing off his body, or lugs a kryptonite continent into space - are outstanding. The CGI is great, the production design is amazing, and Brandon Routh certainly looks every inch the Man of Steel. To see him flying through space, almost for kicks, at the end of the movie as that iconic music starts up again, is a thing of joy. I was glad to have Superman back on the screen.

But the film is by no means perfect. SUPERMAN was always an odd super-hero. Updating BATMAN or SPIDERMAN for the modern age is easy because their pathologies match our own insecurities and cynicism. But SUPERMAN was never a conflicted soul. Sure, he wanted to protect Lois and could not be with her, but this was nothing compared to the angst of the Bat. So, in making SUPERMAN RETURNS the producers had two options. The first was to keep SUPERMAN 100% good, primary-coloured and battling easily delineated evil. Trouble is, in a world where the Evil Empire has been replaced by splinter cells and we have all read THE WATCHMEN, that option seems unsatisfying. The other option is to somehow "update" the franchise.

SUPERMAN RETURNS falls between two stalls. On the one hand, Singer keeps the iconic good versus evil stuff, ladelling on the Christian imagery until it sticks in the throat. On the other hand, he makes Lois a single mum balancing work and child-care, not to mention an inconvenient and ill-used fiance. These innovations seemed weaker than the narrative purity of the original movie. This isn't helped by the fact that Clark Kent (Routh) and Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) have remarkably little screen time together and no chemistry. Where are all those great screwball comedy moments from the old movies?! Kevin Spacey is a shameless ham as Lex Luthor, and poor old Frank Langella has little to do as Perry White. Worst of all, Jimmy Olson is now just an idiot. Also, why cast an actor of such great comic potential - Kal Penn - as Luthor's henchman to have him say ABSOLUTELY nothing?!

Overall then, SUPERMAN RETURNS is a partial success. It's great to see Superman save the world, but you know, how about we save the preaching for church, and next time, let's hope for some actual character development. It's hard to believe that this film was written by the same people who gave us X2.

SUPERMAN RETURNS is on global release.

X MEN: THE LAST STAND - weak

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is the third installment in the wildly popular comic-book franchise. For anyone who doesn't know, the basic idea is that there are a bunch of people in the world who are mutants, with special psychic or physical abilities. These vary from the rubbish - Wolverine can extend knives from his knuckles - to the aweseome - Jean Grey/The Pheonix can atomise people. The world of "normal" people is understandably nervous at having such powerful people in its midst. The mutants react to this fear in one of two ways. The "good guys" try to control their powers and use them only in ethical ways. They are led by Professor Charles Xavier. But another group, led by Magneto, take a more Werner Herzog view of the world. They believe that the natural order of human-mutant relations is aggression and cruelty. The conflict between these two camps forms the back-bone of every X-MEN movie, usually triggered by some half-assed action on the part of well-meaning but feckless "normal" humans. In this case, the humans have isolated a child who carries a natural antibody to the X-gene. (Whatever. I have not read the comics - the "science" is a blur.) Close contact with the kid cures the mutation and the cure is free for all on a voluntary basis. The feckless part is where the government handily soups up some plastic guns with anti-body darts that disable mutants on impact. Nice.

As with any X-MEN movie, THE LAST STAND is full of high quality action sequences. The final set-piece, where Magneto rips up the Golden Gate Bridge to form a path to the cure-centre on Alcatraz, is inspired. (Clearly, it would have just been easier to take a boat.) We also got some really fine acting from Sir Ian McKellan as Magneto, Anna Paquin as Rogue and Kelsey "Frasier" Grammer as Dr. Hank McCoy a.k.a. The Beast. He's a sort of bright blue Chewbacca character who can kick butt while quoting Churchill. This may sound ridiculous but it is fantastic casting. When Grammer plays McCoy, who is a Secretary of State, he has real gravitas. I also want to mention the inspired casting of Cameron Bright as the anti-body kid, for want of a better phrase. That kid has these amazing eyes and a way of holding his gaze on a person that is unnerving. He is perfect for the role, just as he was petrifying in the Nicole Kidman supernatural thriller, BIRTH.

However, despite the great set pieces and some fine acting, I found THE LAST STAND to be a deeply irritating viewing experience. Why? First, Halle Berry, who plays Storm, is so wooden as to make my coffee table look postively animated. When a close friend dies, her tears are less convincing that a contestant in Big Brother. Second, the script is really trite. Take for example two senior clinicians at the cure-lab on Alcatraz who watch Magneto's army rip up the frickin' Golden Gate Bridge and launch a volley of assaults on their lab. About ten minutes in, one turns to the other and says, "they're coming after us." No shit. Similarly, when Magento unleashes a great evil on to the defenders of the lab, he utters the words "what have I done?" in an entirely unconvincing and out-of-character volte face. More generally, while the script raises some interesting issues about who we class as "normal" and the implications of scientific cures for the "abnormal" - it does so in a really ham-fisted manner. Dear lord, to have Rebecca Romjin sit there dressed up as the mutant Mystique, telling her interrogater that she refuses to answer to her "slave name" Raven Darkholme.....

Third, feminists will no doubt be fuming at the final scene featuring Wolverine and Jean Grey. I cannot tell you why this makes me mad without giving away the plot, but suffice to say that those of you familiar with the etymology of the word hysteria, and the phrase la petite mort (thanks to Katya for correction on spelling), will know why this scene undercuts the PC-ness of having Halle Berry as the chief X-MAN. Finally, the last scenes are completely opaque in their meaning. So the anti-body kid is now a student at Xavier's academy? Has he lost his power to de-X the X-men? We're never told. And as for the very last shot of Magneto, what the heck is that meant to mean?

All in all, the plot inconsistencies, bad acting*, suspect social politics and sheer silliness of the script made this the worst episode of the franchise for me. One wonders if it is coincidence that this is the only one of the three to have been helmed by Brett Ratner (the guy behind those Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan Rush Hour movies). Now here's the weird thing. Ratner took over X MEN 3 after the director of the first two movies, Bryan Singer, dropped out to work on the "troubled" Superman movie. Weird thing is, Singer was taking over from....Brett Ratner. So, if Ratner managed to de-X the X-MEN movies, does that mean that the Bryan Singer SUPERMAN RETURNS is gonna kick ass? Stay tuned to find out....

X MEN 3 is open global release. *Amazingly, I am NOT referring to Vinnie Jones here. Vinnie is actually remarkably good in his role as the Juggernaut. Indeed, he has some of the funniest lines in the film. Which means that not only have I praised Vinnie Jones' comic timing in this review, but I have also, implicitly, claimed that so far this summer, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III is the block-buster viewing choice of the man of taste. Blimey.