Reviews

The DVD is based upon the live act, which is constantly on tour. Because of that the DVD will always be great. Unfortunately, the live show took a turn for the worse today. I just saw the last show in Seattle, and tomorrow they head for Vancouver, B.C.

Normally I love the Cirque, but today they made a big mistake. They have replaced their lead character Icarius, previously played by Anton Tchelnokov. I don't know yet if they have found a permanent replacement, but I do hope that it will not be the guy that they had as a stand-in for Anton today. He is dismally lacking the graceful naiveté that made Anton so believable as Icarius.

The show is still an awesome experience... especially Kevin and Andrew Atherton's strap act, and the big finale with all of those incredible athletes performing on the Russian Swings. But for anyone who has seen Anton as the original Icarius, any show in the future will always be lacking something: a Russian kid named Anton who was born to play that role.

Kevin L (kaveman7@msn.com)

The movie was enjoyable, and the special effects were great. However, the dialog is weak and characters were shallow. When Brian Singer ran the show his characters were fully developed and believable, despite their fantastic abilities.

Xavier, Storm, and even Wolverine sound more like they are delivering lines from a sermon, than lines from an action movie. Magneto and Mystique are entirely too predictable. In addition, anyone expecting to get a creative introduction to The Beast or The Angel will be rather disappointed.

In fact, Kelsey Grammar sounds flat and insensitive at times, despite playing the part of one of the most intelligent and sophisticated characters in the Marvel Universe. Ben Foster obviously worked hard to physically prepare for his bare-chested scene as the Angel. But was rewarded with barely a dozen lines in the entire movie.

In the last movie Xavier was the most powerful psychic in the world. Since then he has been demoted (along with Magneto) to a Class 3 mutant. In the meantime, Jean Grey became THE only Class 5 mutant in the world, more powerful than the Prof X and Magneto combined.

The Phoenix story arc seems to be present only to increase the body count, which it does in graphic and gory ways. It is almost as if the writers were told to define the future of each character in the cast, or kill them off.

They list great characters like Omega Red and Psylocke as part of the Full Cast and Crew but they aren't even introduced. Instead they spent time developing 3rd rate characters such as Arclight and Kid Omega. Then there is a great fight sequence between Spike and Wolverine, but the writers don't even introduce us to Spike.

All and all there is plenty of entertainment value, good fight scenes, great special effects, and lots of comic relief (in the form of sight gags, verbal jabs, puns) to hold the audience's attention. In general, its a good movie... I have just come to expect more from the X-Men franchise.