Too much of everything and not enough of anything in Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past, a valuable addition to the X-Men franchise but a redundant piece of blockbuster vapidity from any other perspective. Regular readers may know how I refuse to judge a film on what it is not, and thus this film's contextual value is diminished in what I hope will be an objective report, and that is not to Days of Future Past's benefit. Founded upon the weight of its franchise predecessors, this is a grand and grandiose effort to wrap up loose ends; it'll make no sense at all to newcomers. In itself, though, its grandeur is lost. It's an incredibly hurried film, as the script skips past multiple narrative developments, and as supposedly major characters are relegated to space fillers when no longer fully required. It's not Singer's flippancy that's the problem, but the gravitas he attempts to imbue so much of this film with, when he has not even nearly the time to foster it properly. The film zips along very pleasantly if one can overlook this problem - and a few creative set-pieces temporarily do the trick - but that's a task worthy of the most super of superheroes, and not myself. Singer rushes into shot after shot, scene after scene, designing engaging imagery but failing to allow it to settle, blunt expository dialogue interspersed with even blunter maxims, ultimatums and reiterations of banal soundbites. Still, the film is easier to follow than it could have been, without doubt - a task handily overcame, whether or not one opines that a film ought to set itself difficult tasks it runs so high a risk of falling short on. But as arresting as it may be, or may just strive to be, X-Men: Days of Future Past is plainly too fast on its feet, and unnecessarily so, to arrest one's heart or one's senses as it should.
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