This is my first inebriated article and I though it would be appropriate to review the movie that heralded the golden age of comic book movies…X-MEN. By the way this article assumes that you have seen X-MEN at least 147 times, and each time you desperately tried to mine substance and hope out of it because you wanted to like the movie so bad.
When my father took me to the second game of the World Series in 1996 where the Yankees lost to the Atlanta Braves, he left the stadium shouting a stream of obscenities that invoked a sense of menace in anyone within a five-foot radius of him and caused me to timidly walk behind him. One thing he said that was etched into my memory was “I WAITED ALL MY #@*^ING LIFE FOR THIS AND THIS IS WHAT I GET!!!” Little did him or I know that only a mere week and a half later the Yanks would go on to win the series in New York and that him and I in the middle of the celebration in the Bronx would be unwittingly interviewed by TELEMUNDO (the Spanish TV station in NYC).
This is very similar to my experience with X-MEN. When I first saw it at the age of 20 I said out loud “ I WAITED FOR THIS ALL MY LIFE AND THIS IS WHAT I @#&*ING GET” (like father like son I guess). I was sure that this movie would flat line any potential for future comic book movies…. little did I know.
Now I am a hyper critical person by nature and I guess that is why I don’t do good in relationships, but revisiting this movie 11 years later with 10 glasses of my own home brew in my belly sort of mellows out the Pharisee in me. With that in mind I ask the question- Does X-MEN have any ancillary drunk value? The answer is yes and no. NO because after seeing all the other butcheries FOX studios has done with the X-MEN franchise through the years, it’s hard not to notice the blinding continuity issues, even if you are as thoroughly nuked as I am. For example, take this one line of dialogue from X-MEN
Professor X: When I was 17 I met a man named Eric Lensherr.
Well according to X-MEN first class Charles Xavier didn’t meet Magneto until after he was a Professor at Oxford…. that doesn’t happen when you’re 17.
Anyway, if we ignore all this and put it all aside the movie does resonate better when you’re drunk. Watching it drunk I actually felt the tension and timidity of Rouge right before she kissed a boy for the first time and could sense her fear and uncertainty when she hitch hiked her way to Canada and ended up in an uninviting dive bar. The apathy of Wolverine was vivid as he leaned up against the cage smoking a cigar while his last opponent was dragged away unconscious. The dynamic between Charles and Eric while not edge of your seat drama was nonetheless heartfelt. Yeah sure Cyclops, Storm, and Jean-Grey were still obviously marginalized but I was drunk enough to gloss over this. Since the character development is thicker and meatier when your drunk the action scenes seem more substantive, not rushed and therefore enjoyable. As a matter of fact I may have even just now mined that precious gem of substance that I sought so earnestly for out of this movie. The one thing that always bothered me more than anything else about this movie was it’s ending, you know where Storm sees Senator Kelly on the TV pressing through a thronging crowd of reporters and she immediately recognizes Kelly as Mystique (apparently nobody else watching the report of this anywhere in the world could see the glaring unnatural yellow eyes except Storm). Well it bothered me that this ending was an obvious setup for a sequel and more than just that, it gave the movie a weekly, serialized, episodic feel to it….but now I realize that is exactly the way a comic book movie should be….just like a monthly, serialized comic.
So in conclusion I give this movie 4 out of 6 empty bottles…let me know what you think.