Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2009

X-Men Character Likenesses TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. TM and ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved

As if sequels and prequels weren’t bad enough, Hollywood has now latched on to yet another way to put fanboy butts in seats: the origin movie. Please, make it stop! This impersonal and joyless exercise in emptiness strives to clear up some of the barely interesting mysteries about how the charisma-free, badass title character got to be the way he is. The whole uninspired magilla is declawed, of course, by the fact that we already know where he ends up. For this to work, you have to care, and there is little here between the frequent feral sneering, snarling and fighting remotely akin to human nature. A bright spot is a scene-stealing Liev Schreiber as W’s evil brother. Not great, but he does what he can with the material, as does Hugh Jackman. The scariest thing about all this is the plural in the title. There are a lot of X-Persons, and seemingly no one is able to stop the evil Hollywood machine from churning out a banal flick like this on each of them. I’d gladly become a fanboy of a superhero that could do that!

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