X-Men review

Comic book superheroes used to be golden geese for profit-hungry film companies but one too many rotten eggs in recent years - The Phantom, Batman & Robin, Spawn - all but consigned the genre to the grave.

Thanks to X-Men, buff men and even buffer women clad in impossibly tight body-suits are in vogue once more. At least until Batman 5 comes along.

It's the near future and the world is still divided: not by race, sex, religion or class, but by genetics. A new subspecies of human, known as mutants, has emerged, blessed with strange and wondrous powers. Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) leads the calls for all mutants to be registered so that decent and hard-working American citizens will know exactly who - and what - their neighbours are.

The mutants are understandably frightened by the implications of drawing attention to themselves. Their cause isn't helped by embittered mutant Magneto (Ian McKellen), a Nazi concentration camp survivor who fears a new age of persecution is on the horizon. He plans to declare war on the humans, aided by the shape-shifting Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), the fearsome Sabretooth (Tyler Mane), and the slippery Toad (Ray Park).

Mankind's only hope rests with wheelchair-bound telepath Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his band of champions: Cyclops (James Marsden), Storm (Halle Berry), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Dr Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and energy vampire Rogue (Anna Paquin). Let the battle begin...

Shoe-horning so many characters and so much back story into a little over 100 minutes, director Bryan Singer is forced to relegate many key players to bit-parts.

Rogue, Cyclops and Jean Grey are barely two-dimensional and Magneto's henchmen have no personalities. Their so-called powers also seem rather feeble compared to the X-Men (Storm could just summon a hurricane and blow them away like troublesome flies).

Wolverine and Rogue are afforded the lion's share of screen time, and both Jackman and Paquin deliver solid performances. As the feral killing machine, Jackman brings out the anger and sadness of a lifelong loner. He develops a touching brother-sister relationship with Paquin, who transforms Rogue into a tragic figure, never able to let anyone get close to her.

Fans of the comic books will spot plenty of in-jokes and clever touches in David Hayter's screenplay. There are also cameos from Kitty Pride and Bobby Drake, aka Iceman. Action sequences are choreographed and edited to within an inch of their lives, combining every trick in the book to make the duels between good and evil as spectacular as possible.

As an aperitif before the main course - X-Men 2 in 2002 - Singer's film guarantees plenty of larger-than-life action and more style than you can shake Wolverine's claws at.

You come out of the cinema hungry for more, though sadly not for all the right reasons.