The Heart of Me
15, 96mins

A WISE MAN once said that nothing dates like the future, and even with a sci-fi movie as well executed as Bryan Singer’s X-Men 2 there’s a whiff of stale franchise in the air. Maybe it’s the conveniently skintight outfits worn by many of the female mutants, who often tart themselves up like they’ve been rummaging in a Star Trek garage sale.

Still, at least Storm (Halle Berry) gets to team a comedy Diana Dors wig with her rubber jumpsuit. Shape-changing Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) gets only a small shred of swimming costume and a lick of blue paint, while Jean Grey gets to dress like a futuristic librarian who must endure having her hair tousled every so often by superheroes keen to let her know how beautiful she really is. Then we get Anna Paquin as Rogue, who would be a regular moody teenager if she didn’t have the bad habit of sucking the life out of everything she touches.

Of the men, mutant newcomer Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), comes across as a desperate drama student who paints himself blue and inserts vampire fangs to get himself remembered by casting directors. Wagner also stands out because he’s the most openly camp sci-fi character ever. He doesn’t actually say: “Shut that spaceship door,” but it gets kind of close.

Of the other male mutants, they seem to fare better in the sartorial stakes the older they get — Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) accessorising with a ritzy wheelchair, Magneto (Ian McKellen) overcoming his distress at being given a name that sounds like an ice lolly to resemble Hannibal Lecter dipped in celestial light. Brian Cox, as the sinister anti-mutant agent Stryker, avoids dressing up altogether and gets to wear a regular suit.

Only Hugh Jackman as Wolverine seems to have really lost out, coming across as Mel Gibson in a semi-collapsed quiff, sideburns that extend to his nipples and Swiss Army knives coming out of his fingers. For all his habit of talking as if he’s simultaneously cracking walnuts between his thighs, Wolverine is a sensitive sort who wants to know the stuff he can’t remember about his past which we keep being told he’d be better off not remembering. If you see what I mean, and I bet you don’t.

But then, this seems to be the deal with X-Men 2, even more than it was with X-Men — everything is bright and noisy and in your face apart from the actual plot, which sneaks about in the shadows, desperate not to be caught and forced to explain itself. Basically, this time around the humans and the mutants have a shared menace that threatens both their realities. All this and kidnapping, super powers, evolution turned inside out, and a script that includes lines like: “My telepathy has been off a bit lately.”

It would seem that, along with the quasi-fascist aggro threatening Xavier’s school for gifted mutants, there is a new militancy in the air. The opening sequence, depicting an assassination attempt on the President, ends with the hissed words: “Mutant freedom now!” After that, it all gets a little difficult to work out who’s who, what’s what, and why’s why.

There seems to be one too many baddies and so many goodies wandering around it’s like a coach party arrived from Planet Nice Guy.

Not that it really matters. While the central themes of difference, tolerance and isolation verge on the jingoistic, X-Men 2 remains a decent enough sci-fi effort, which delivers on most of the levels fans could expect. Too bad it’s hampered by a plot that wouldn’t get green-lit for an average episode of Buffy.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Heart of Me is a frail little movie which tries to hide its tragic lack of point behind beautiful 1930s costumes and a clipped Britishness so uptight that you expect everyone to lift up their clothes to reveal that they’re wearing elastic bandages for underwear.

Helena Bonham Carter plays Dinah, a free spirit who gets a bit too free and spirited with her sister’s husband, Rickie (Paul Bettany), embarking on an affair with him that wrecks all their lives. Olivia Williams plays Madeleine, the dutiful elegant sister who has to stand by and look embittered as Dinah races around with artistic curly hair being “wild” and generally an irritating baggage. As Rickie, Bettany has to look totally smitten with Dinah even as he is riddled with guilt about Madeleine.

There is a lot of pain and death in The Heart of Me, as if the storytellers felt they had to make up for the brief excursions into nudity in the lovemaking scenes. Children die, ulcers rupture, births go wrong, but there’s still plenty of time for a poignant scene of Bonham Carter coquettishly flying a kite.

How, one wonders, do movies like this still get made? Does everyone just turn up one day, and refuse to go home until a cameraman arrives? In a movie as milk-weak as this it’s a bit of a shock to have someone as good as Eleanor Bron turn up, although in all fairness Williams is also affecting as far as the tears-and-Ovaltine script will allow her to be. There’s an intriguing restraint about her performance which hints at the movie this could have been, a harrowing tale of entrapment, duty and redemption, instead of what it is — a costume drama where the costumes call the shots.

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