I’m going to put in some spoiler space. Fundamentally, unless you are enough of a Marvel geek to be able to get the Age of Apocalypse team bonus in X-Men Legends II without going to a cheat site — even if you did have to go to your copy of the TPB to do it — then I’m not going to ruin anything for you. If you know that Wolverine lost his hand in AofA, and are frantic with worry about how the retconning is going to affect Cable and Deadpool Vol 6, I suggest you look away now.

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So let me just start by saying that, while you might not think it, I’m a fan of the first two films in the franchise. I liked the first one and I loved the second. I have two copies — bought them singly then had to have the box set. The X-Men films are on my top ten list of things to do to cheer myself up; along with Alien³, the alternate version. So I’m not against the films on principle. I was so excited about this one and looking forward to it so much that we bought tickets for the opening night.

People who know my reaction to crowded cinemas will understand that this means it was a Very Big Deal and I was Super-Hyped.

The cinema was sold out. Even so it started off well enough. Jean Grey’s first line got a laugh from the assembled mass of students, which was fair enough if a bit irritating. I was expecting the fastball special to be a dodgy because Thudthwacker had said it was from a clip he’d seen. (For what it’s worth, Joe, if you’re reading, there is a reason why the Sentinel was piss-poor, so fret not about that.) Logan got his pithy one-liners and Shadowcat was there and it was all looking quite promising.

Sadly that opening sequence is the best part of the film. The rest of it was… weak. If you think you’ll enjoy a couple of hours of playing X-Men bingo (that’s the Grant Morrison storyline; there’s the Joss Whedon; oh that’s how they’re going to play the stuck in a lifepod at the bottom of the sea thing; he was only ever seen in the Evolution animation) then make a list of your favourite X-Men clichés and take it with you. It might make it more fun.

The performances were lazy, I thought. A lot of people were anticipating Kelsey Grammar making a good Beast, and maybe he would have done had he been given opportunity. But he wasn’t and was shite. Even the lovely Hugh seemed to be choking against some leash of directorial restriction. The only person who seemed to manage was Halle Berry, and that was because she never tried to do very much with her character in the first place.

Nothing was made of Archangel’s homosexuality, but then I guess it was a 12A. It was most definitely a more childish rendition than the previous two. It didn’t make even a ham-fisted attempt of dealing with the big issues. Here they are, using the “mutant cure” plotline familiar to all Marvel fans, and yet, at that crucial point when they had to choose a course of action that would define them as X-Men and there was an opportunity to look at the issues underpinning the very reason for the series’ existence, they ignore it. They ignore its implications. The X-Men do exactly what anyone else would do and therefore become just another bunch of guys in suits with mutant abilities. They walk right over the shreds of Xavier’s dream and don’t even seem to notice.

I was hoping that the success of Batman Begins would have indicated that the global audience is ready for and desiring of a return to adult superhero movies. I should not have been so naïve.

What we got was Jean Grey wandering around as an evil Willow, but without the black eyes and the witty dialogue. We had Logan suddenly turning into the biggest team player of the lot, with his internal rage and samurai spirit devolved into that of a star-crossed lover with a crush on his mentor. We had Mystique rendered 2D, shallow and pointless — literally — by halfway through the film. Rogue was simply there as icing sugar. She had hardly anything to do with anything. Vinnie Jones was given nothing to do in an appalling bodysuit (and frankly, when it comes down to it, once X-Men is dumbed down so much that Juggernaut is just another mutant because otherwise it’s too complicated, all hope of a reasonable rendition is lost).

The entire cast seemed to be sleepwalking. And I had an even bigger problem: one can reasonably expect, even if the plot gets wishy-washy and the actors get bored, that the special effects will improve as a franchise goes on. I couldn’t work out where the special effects budget had gone. Mystique looked like a girl painted blue with bits of rubber doily stuck to her. In fact, I think my granny had a pink swimming cap that they must have dyed blue and used to cover Ms Romijn’s breasts.

It felt like bad fanfic. Really bad fanfic. It was just the same old clichéd plot lines being recycled, but not even done well. If you’re going to do the Grant Morrison Planet X ending, use his dialogue: it was a singularity of characterisation that encapsulated everything you ever needed to know about the relationship between Wolverine and Jean Grey. Don’t just say: “Do anguish, Hugh old boy, there’s a dear.” It doesn’t wash.

I wasn’t expecting perfection but, given that they’d made a decent hash of two of the things already, I was expecting better than this. A lot better.

All they had to do was bring in a mass of Sentinels, get Nick Fury involved, and maybe give it a hint of reference to current global politics. Hell. They could have had Apocalypse stand in for Osama Bin Laden, even, as trite as that might have been. It would have been better than this, which seemed to shy away from anything remotely resembling an awareness of current world issues.

That is what the X-Men are about, at the end of the day. Being the outsiders. The arbitrary labelling of “us” and “them”. The desire and need both to be with your own kind, to be tribal, and yet not to stand out in a crowd. To be both in and out at the same time. X-Men is all about shades of grey presented in a subtle disguise of good and evil. The presentation of ordinary, every-day problems in skintight lycra just to make a point.

There was plenty of opportunity in the storyline they used, and an occasional glimmer of hope that they might use it. Alas, no. Not even a sideways reference to current issues with genetic testing for congenital abnormalities.

Deeply disappointing. It gets its own new category: Couldabeen, Shouldabeen, Wasn’t.