Lacking the X-Factor

A short coda after the end credits suggests a further episode of one of the cinema's most popular comic-book series may be on the horizon. But it will have to be better than this slam-bang all-action effort if it's to remain credible.

Even with stars like Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Sir Ian McKellen and Famke Janssen, this third version of the Marvel Comics franchise wears thin before the end.

It's got all the special effects you could want, including the displacement of the Golden Gate Bridge across San Francisco Bay. But it has a script even McKellen, the saviour of The Da Vinci Code, can't invest with gravitas and a plot so convoluted it might puzzle a fully paid up Marvelite.

Hollywood had the bright idea of placing a clever and ambitious young director like Bryan Singer in charge of the second in the series but has forsaken that for commercial hackery for the third.

Brett Ratner is competent but entirely without the imagination required. So the whole is traversed almost on auto-pilot, rather like The Da Vinci Code.

Scientists herald a cure that will let the world's superhuman mutants become ordinary again. Some accept the offer, seeing their powers more of a curse than a blessing. But the renegade Magneto (McKellen) has other ideas.

Professor Xavier (Stewart) opposes him for the sake of humanity and the X-Men, mourning the death of a team member, follow him bravely.

One of the film's problems, though it doesn't lack either pace or visceral excitement, is that there are so many supporting characters, some of them new, like Ben Foster's Angel and Cameron Bright's Jimmy, a boy with the ability to dispel mutant powers. Even Berry's weather girl Storm hasn't much to do except look fetching.

Only at the end, a climax staged at Alcatraz, does the film play off the mutants' various powers against each other effectively.

But even here you can't really feel that there's anything at stake that's truly momentous. For avid fans.