Fans of the hugely popular "X-Men" Marvel comic book series (created by Stan Lee in 1963 — and featuring him in a cameo performance as a hot dog vendor) will happily find a lion’s share of the comic’s historical minutiae defining the group of persecuted genetic mutants in what promises to be the first of several X-Men movies. But the movie fails to adequately fulfill the comic book’s dark/edgy tone and there are tedious scenes of exposition with no conflict, and that don’t move the story forward. Even X-Men’s ambitious special effects and super-action fight sequences drag when they should soar because of clunky dialogue and awkward editing. There are however a few flashy scenes that redeem the price of admission. Hollywood’s bumpy journey to bringing comic book characters to life on the big screen may be improving, but only by degrees.

Still, X-Men does a handy job of juggling its numerous heroes and villains.

On the telepathic Professor Charles Xavier’s (Patrick Stewart - Dune) good guy team is Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen - The Faculty), a telepathic and telekinetic object of desire for fellow mutants, Cyclops (James Marsden – Disturbing Behavior), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). James Marsden bears the stamp of being X-Men’s only miscast actor due to his inability to overcome the demands of acting with the encumbrance of sunglasses. Cyclops fires beams of energy from his eyes when they are uncovered, but Marsden never animates his character’s tortured soul, so that what comes across on the screen is more like human furniture than individual identity. Storm (Halle Berry – Bulworth) can control local atmospheric conditions at a whim, while newcomer Rogue (Anna Paquin - The Piano) fumbles with her unintentional chastity belt of draining the life out of anyone she touches. Rogue’s particular genetic mutation provides an outlandish metaphorical love scene with Wolverine, who receives a kiss equal to ten orgasms. Whew. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) gets special attention as the story’s confrontational and oversexed protagonist. Wolverine has Freddie Kruger styled steel claws that eject from between his knuckles like giant switchblades thanks to a metal alloy grafted onto his entire skeleton. Jackman’s feature-film debut establishes a ferocious screen presence for the Australian actor that should make him an obvious choice for a new generation of action films.

Bad guy leader of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants, and Holocaust escapee Magneto (Ian McKellen - Apt Pupil) has telekinetic powers to control magnetic forces. Magneto’s wayward band of mutants include the gigantic primal man, Sabertooth (Tyler Mane - U.W.F Wrestler), the 20-foot tongue lashing Toad (Ray Park - Sleepy Hollow), and slinky metamorph Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos - Boomerang). Mutants are outcasts from society because they are different. Magneto wants to convert all world-leaders to mutants with the use of force, while Xavier runs a special school for mutants in Westchester County to help the adapt and direct the mutants’ special skills toward peaceful ends. If Malcolm X versus the Reverend Martin Luther King springs to mind in the inherent theme, remember the comic did originate in the ’60s.

While the X-Men story is set in modern-day New York and Washington D.C., it doesn’t possess enough contemporary thematic vibrancy to give the filmmakers and actors anything more than a cardboard cut-out of colorful action/drama. X-Men director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) is capable of perfectly capturing uncomfortable unity between candor and duplicity, as he did in Apt Pupil (1998) but one can feel in the lapses of pacing, the here he is constantly searching for some nonexistent anchor of social-political import that could take the movie to a level of, say, Robocop or Starship Troopers.

One critical component to the X-Man story revolves around a McCarthy-like Senator (Bruce Davison - Grace of My Heart) who wants all "known mutants" to be registered. The sub-plot doesn’t work because it’s just not the way politics or smear campaigns are run anymore. Instead of delving into current politics the way Stan Lee did when he created the comic, the writers rely instead on an out-dated national and global picture that ignores a wealth of narrative fuel from vast issues like the Russian Mafia’s, and the World Bank’s, stranglehold on individuals through economic repression. That may seem like highfalutin concept stuff in relation to comic book characters, but it’s consistent with the level of seriousness that X-Men fans exude in their interest to the comic.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, 1994) breaks a code of dramatic intention in What Lies Beneath that kills not only the film’s fleeting moments of excitement but also any speck of empathy that an audience might observe for its characters. He does this by piling up so many false starts of plot and faux shocks of terror that by the time the story finally gets around to making sense with some nitty-gritty horror scenes, the audience has become numb to the suspense. The loud bursts of sound, in conjunction with quick revealing edits, may shake you in your seat, but there’s no longer any reason to care about the characters because the filmmakers have, by then, repeatedly shown such disrespect by leading you down dead-end lanes of sub-plot as if to shout "got ya," and rub your nose in your own gullibility. In case that weren’t enough, Alan Silvestri’s musical score rips off Bernard Herrmann’s musical arrangement for Psycho to such a degree that it’s perilously close to plagiarism.

Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford - Patriot Games) and Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer - The Fabulous Baker Boys) are a well- to-do married couple finally alone in their lovely lakeside home after sending their daughter off to college. Claire is a beautiful woman with too much time on her hands, and so becomes an ideal lightening rod for a ghost from Norman’s not so distant adulterous past. But Claire’s so busy in the first third of the movie following the suspicious movements of her new neighbors that the ghost has to kick up a lot of dust to get the appropriate attention.

The teaser for What Lies Beneath reads: "He was the perfect husband until his one mistake followed them home." It gives away who the real threat is before you even see the movie. You end up biding time in your seat waiting for Norman (Bates anyone?) to show his true colors. Except that this Norman just has some vague problem with being mistaken for his late father at social functions and on the phone. Norman is so busy working on some research paper at the local college that he seems more of a bore than a threat. Even when he turns nasty toward Claire, you half expect him to go running off to his comfortable office to get back to work.

Norman’s poorly developed subplot isn’t helped by Harrison Ford’s declining acting ability. Ford has shifted into a look-at-what-great-shape-I’m-in, mumbling style of acting that disregards his co-actors as if they were just one more prop to use at his discretion.

It’s not an attitude that fares well in the inestimable sphere of Michelle Pfeiffer’s talents. Pfeiffer acts beyond Ford’s range, and the outside the story’s depleting inertia by constantly mapping out emotions and ideas that register on her enigmatic face like frequent flashes of important coded messages. In the lack of screen chemistry between Pfeiffer and Ford is a clear vision of how far her talent soars above his. As Papillon (1973) documented what a better actor Steve McQueen was than Dustin Hoffman, What Lies Beneath gives audiences unmistakable glimpses of what separates the men from the boys in acting ability.

The work of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or Roman Polanski shows the genre of suspense applied with loving care equally toward audience and narrative. There’s never a scene that insults anyone’s intelligence because their films are a sharing of experience and fear that have a weight of import directly related to life experience. That life experience is not one impinging on capitalist concerns but rather emotional value and an grasp for learning that leaves an audience with something they didn’t have before.

Highly criticized movies like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or Polanski’s The Ninth Gate bestow audiences with a way of seeing and feeling that’s at once cozily familiar, and yet dauntingly removed. Those films may not touch us in a way we knowingly want to be touched, but it’s a far better cinematic experience than being psychologically groped by a movie like What Lies Beneath.