By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Bryan Singer’s scene-setting 2000 comic book adaptation X-Men, starring Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry.
Aaaaaaaargh! Another one! Will they never stop? Upon seeing the superhero movie Supergirl hurtling its way into cinemas this week, an exasperated Butcher exclaimed, “What’s it going to be next? Fat Cat? Sesame Street? The Wonder Pets? Humphrey B. Bear?” Well, while none of those goo-goo-ga-ga favourites have ended up on the screen yet, it’s likely just a matter of time. As the film world becomes increasingly childish and immature in its superhero obsession, all even half-way mature moviegoers are made to suffer…and made to suffer hard.
That’s right, people, comic books are for kids…and so are comic book movies! Sure, all the adolescent mush-heads (and adult mush-heads, for that matter) on the internet might spend hours banging away on blogs and forums about the finer details of comic book movies like they’re great works of cinematic art, but unfortunately, they’re not. Superman, Suicide Squad, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman, Thor, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Batman…they’re just silly fantasies driven by grown men poncing around in capes or metal suits, throwing hammers at people, or rubbish like that.
Critics, pundits and “fan-boys” (read: losers who spend hours on the internet because they like to show how “clever” they are with their “witty” blog ripostes) might talk about the subtexts of these films, but that’s like looking for meaning in an episode of Teletubbies. If you like these comic book movies, that’s fine (though it means you’re an idiot), but don’t try and make out like they’re something they’re not.
When it comes to crapping on about a comic book movie’s “deeper themes” and “sense of meaning”, no adaptation sparked more pretentious twaddle than 2000’s X-Men. Just because it opened with a scene set in a WW2 concentration camp, everyone thought it was a film with “something to say.” Yeah, whatever. The only thing truly extraordinary about this film is how bad Halle Berry’s acting is.
Like high school students doing a “compare and contrast” exercise in English, critics saw the film’s story about persecuted mutants (you know, guys with claws and laser beams shooting out of their eyes and dumb shit like that) as an allegory for, well, just about everything, from homophobia to racism. Puh-lease. In the case of X-Men, X did indeed mark the spot…for rubbish.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Game Of Thrones, Jurassic Park, The Hurt Locker, Raging Bull, The Castle, Amelie, The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
