Before we get on to the actual ratings, I want to discuss the previews I saw before X-Men started.

Hollow Man - Hot diggity damn, this one's going to kick ass.

Nutty Professor II: The Klumps - Anyone who finds this preview amusing should be sterilized immediately. Eddie Murphy is brilliant, but this.. is not.

Cirque de Soliel: Journey of Man - I fucking hate the French.

Blair Witch 2 - From a financial point of view, this is brilliant. From an artistic point of view, this is a grave insult.

Now on to the feature presentation.

Wow!

I mean, aside from the first two Batmans, pretty much any movie based on a comic book has sucked complete ass. You can pelt me now; I include The Crow in this list of Suck, a clear case of a movie being obscenely overrated due to .. well, God knows what.

Not the case with X-Men. This movie is absolutely a solid, tight-fisted flick that knows exactly where its priorities lie. As if the rest of the press hasn't clarified this enough, this is essentially Wolverine: The Movie, and no finer actor exists to portray that tortured Canuck than the one they picked -- Hugh Jackman. I've never seen this guy before, but I sure as hell hope I see more of him in years to come.

The story of X-Men could have been lifted from a classic Cold War-era paranoia horror flick of the 50's, and 60's. A new leap in evolution is among us humans, and they are the mutants. These mutants are metahumans.. they are us, but with little extra kinks. The downtrodden Rogue (Anna Paquin) can absorb the memories of another with but a mere touch. Storm (Halle Berry, but anyone who's seen Strange Days knows it should've been Angela Bassett) has the considerably awe-inspiring ability to control the weather. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen, an underrated talent) is both telepath and telekinetic.

Pretty nifty stuff, overall.

But the norms don't think so. They're scared. The surge of new mutants with unstable powers has the much larger population of normal humans worried, and one senator is leading the anti-mutant crusade in a very McCarthyesque fashion, right down to the "list of mutants living in this very city." This particular senator would like to see every mutant registered, numbered, filed away and eventually locked up behind bars.

This stinks a little too much of the Holocaust of Erik Lehnsherr's (Ian McKellan) youth, and he's decided that before humans can give themselves the chance to start a mutant genocide, he's going to take charge and pave the way for the new race, Homo superior. The mutants.

But that isn't what Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), aka Professor X, is all about. He wants to teach mutants to use their abilities for good, and to coexist peacefully with humanity. A critic or two has wrongly said the Xavier/Lehnsherr paradigm resembles that of the Martin Luther King/Malcolm X duality of the civil rights movement, but this is not the case. Malcolm X demanded respect for the black race. Lehnsherr, going under the name Magneto, demands dominance.

Xavier's X-Men and Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants clash mightily, with Wolverine's struggle for identity and Rogue's loneliness as the pivotal center. These two can go either way -- tolerance or hatred -- and their choice will determine the fate of the two teams, and perhaps of the world at large. That struggle and that loneliness are played up beautifully in the picture.

The comic books are laden with juvenile, heavy-handed emotion tossed out every other panel, mixed in with the spandex and Ka-BOOMs. Thankfully, the movie has a much more mature approach, and thus the audience can identify with the genuine, rather than forced, emotion of the two leads.

Should you see it? You bet. Even if you happen to be older than 25, the movie is still a fun adventure, and miraculously manages to not come across as silly when by every right it should. Still, there are faults: Storm and Cyclops seem to have questionably minor roles, and the resolution of the major conflict is somewhat lacking in oomph. But the general entertainment factor is still there in force, and that makes X-Men one of the better films of the summer.