X-MEN LOSE THEIR X-FACTOR
With a jumble of stars and painful in-jokes, there really is no joy in the X-Men any more
THERE are many manifestations of X-Men fatigue, but it was best expressed by the chap sitting next to me about two hours into this latest barrage of dazzling effects, pointed in-jokes and tortuous storytelling.
‘I just don’t care any more,’ he sighed, and I’m pretty sure he was referring to mutants in particular rather than life in general.
I tend towards the same view, unless a new X-Men film can captivate me in the way that few have since the first one was unleashed at the start of the century. And this one simply doesn’t.
The original director, Bryan Singer, has taken up the loudhailer again for the last two films and in fairness to him, he knows how to put on a show. here we begin in 3600BC, but quickly whizz forward to 1983, ten years after the story told in the last instalment, X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Needless to say, there’s trouble brewing, because the original and most powerful mutant, Egyptian god-king En Sabah Nur, played by an unrecognisable oscar Isaac, has woken from the dead in an ominously bad mood.
Not for nothing is he known as Apocalypse, and he doesn’t take long to decide that the world as he finds it must end.
To rid the planet of its own so-called superpowers — cited in an alarming show of geopolitical naivety as ‘Russia, China and England’ — as a prelude to destroying it altogether, Apocalypse needs to harness the psychic skills of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). But that is an inconvenient distraction from Professor Xavier’s full-time job running his school for gifted youngsters as a mixture of Albus Dumbledore and Mary Poppins. ‘Spit spot, back to bed,’ he tells one pupil. Dame Julie Andrews should sue.
AS SO often, the conceit of the X-Men format is also its handicap. So many characters need squeezing in, each with their own private narrative arc, that the film ends up as an epic mainly in the scale of the jumble it presents.
In Professor X’s case, that means him making cow eyes at Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), the CIA agent whose memories of their long-ago tryst he has wiped, evidently for her own good.
Then there’s the most conflicted of the mutants, Magneto (Michael Fassbender). We first meet him living happily with a wife and daughter in a forest clearing in his native Poland, and holding down a job at the local steel factory.
But when he is forced to deploy his unique strengths to save the life of a colleague, the authorities realise they have a potentially dangerous weirdo in their midst.
Tragedy ensues and Magneto becomes the one thing that no one wants: a mutant with an axe to grind. Apocalypse duly signs him up to help destroy the world.
All this — and lots of other mini-narratives, which I must overlook for the sake of brevity (not a concept Singer has much truck with) — builds to the inevitable climactic showdown against a checklist of an Eighties backdrop.
The Eurythmics on the soundtrack: tick. Ronald Reagan grinning down from a CIA office wall: double tick. We even see the mutant-pupils emerging from a screening of Return of The Jedi, enabling one of those unsubtle in-jokes. ‘The third one is always the worst,’ says Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), which we can probably interpret as a cheeky swipe at the third X-Men movie, 2003’s The Last Stand.
That was the first one not directed by Singer, whose apparently abundant self-confidence this loud, brash, but not very coherent film does little to justify.
SING STREET also sweeps us back to the Eighties, but with so much fun and charm that this time it really is a journey worth taking.
Writer-director John Carney’s film is set in Dublin in 1985, where 15year-old Conor (beautifully played by newcomer, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) seeks refuge from his squabbling parents (Maria Doyle Kennedy and Aidan Gillen) by forming a band.
Looking on, alternately encouraging
and undermining him, is his cynical older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor, also excellent).
At the same time, Conor is removed from private education and forced to attend a tough new school, Synge Street, where he is relentlessly bullied both by other boys and the dreaded Christian Brothers, who run the place.
That makes the band, neatly named Sing Street, even more of a refuge for him. Plus, there’s a vision of loveliness in the form of Raphina ( Lucy Boynton), a slightly older girl who wants to move to London, but in the meantime is willing to feature in Sing Street’s videos.
Gradually, the film becomes less about Conor’s relationship with music, and more about his relationship with her. Troublingly, she has an older boyfriend, though Conor’s big brother Brendan thinks he’s nothing to worry about. ‘No woman can truly love a man who listens to Phil Collins,’ he observes
There are echoes of The Commitments in all this, and I was also strongly reminded of Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl. But, of course, that was a depiction of its own time, whereas this is a pure and joyous nostalgia trip.
On the other hand, while it certainly helps to have first-hand memories of the Duran Duran years, it’s also a portrait of teenage confusion and yearnings that could apply to any era.
The story doesn’t exactly brim with originality, and yet I enjoyed it immensely and unreservedly.
It is funny, poignant, romantic and smart. There’s not a single false note.