Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter X

Xchange (2000) is built on the premise that people can move long distances quickly by exchanging their body with someone else via a mind-swapping machine. Only when reluctant traveller Toffler wants to make the return journey, he finds that his body has been hijacked by a corporate terrorist. Then his consciousness is swapped into a clone with a remaining life of just 52 hours. And if he doesn't have his mind moved elsewhere, he'll be dead.
Toffler does a runner from the Exchange building in San Franciso and heads for New York, only to find that there is a missile waiting to home in on his temporary ID when he takes it out of a shielded pouch! Lots of sex, violence and corporate skulduggery, and quite an entertaining couple of hours.

X-Files, The (1998) A caveman battles a creature deep underground and is invaded by creatures from its blood. Cut to the present. A kid falls into a hole in the ground in Texas and his body is invaded by worm-like creatures, which wander about under his skin. He is whisked away in a helicopter and the government moves in to cover things up.
   A week later, our 2 heroes, Scurrilous & Muldoon, are looking for a bomb in Dallas. They find it in the wrong building and the leader of their team orders an evacuation and then sits back and waits for the bomb to go off. Three people are found in the wreck; the kid from earlier and 3 of the firemen who got him out of the hole.
   Scully decides to quit X-filing and Mulder goes to a bar to get loaded. There, he meets a bloke who tells him the bodies were dead before the building blew. At a secret government laboratory, there's another fireman being digested by an alien organism. S&M get a shock when they sneak a look at the bodies in Dallas; no autopsies were performed and there's a cover-up going on. Mulder is warned that the US government has the Ultimate Plague.
   A creature hatches out of the fireman before he can be given a vaccine. It attacks a researcher, so his colleagues bury the entrance to the lab. The human stooges of aliens which say they want to colonize Earth realize that the real plan is to use the human race for food as part of a replacement plan. S&M have fun & games with bees then black helicopters chase them through a corn crop at another secret research station out in the desert.
   Scully tells Mulder she's definitely quitting but she collapses after one of the bees stings her. Mulder calls for help, Scully is kidnapped by the government and Mulder is shot but only grazed. The 'Lone Gunmen' gang help him to escape, and he is given the antidote and a silly story about an ancient virus, which was around on Earth before the dinosaurs. Then his informant's car blows up.
   Mulder heads off somewhere snowy, tracks Scully down in an underground lab, gives her the vaccine and they escape as aliens start hatching out of the other bodies in storage. An ice dome collapses on the secret base, a huge spaceship heads into space and the whole thing is covered up. But S&M decide to carry on regardless; as do the conspirators. They set up their bees and corn crop somewhere in Tunisia.

X-Men (2000, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen) is Marvel Comics superheroes on the big screen. In the near future, there are lots of mutants causing trouble in the USA and the rest of the world. Two earlier generation mutants have opposing views on how they should interact with normals.
Dr. Xavier (Cap'n Picard of Star Trek TNG), is running a school for gifted children as a cover for training good mutants. His old pal/enemy, Magneto, has a gang of bad mutants and he wants to use his machine to turn everyone at a gathering of world leaders on Ellis Island into mutants to get them on the mutants' side.
One small problem. Magneto tries his machine on a McCarthy-like senator and he turns into gloop then a puddle. So the forces of light, led by the psychic Dr. Xavier, have to save the world. Lots of special effects and action, and bits knocked off the poor old Statue of Liberty again. Xavier's select task force of mutants; Rogue, Wolverine, Storm & Cyclops, win and Magneto ends up in a plastic prison without metal that he can influence. But he intends to continue the war.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2005) 20 years before, Charles & Eric were recruiting the mutants, some reluctant, like Jean & Warren. Then a battle with a monster machine, which turns out to be only a simulation at the Dept. of Mutant Affairs. Homeland Security is tracking Eric, a.k.a. Magneto, whose agent is trying to steal a mutant gene suppressing agent.
   Magneto organizes a protest of mutants who don't think they have a disease. Dead Jean returns to Scott. Winged Warren refuses to take the cure. Magneto frees his agent, who tells him that the source of the cure is a mutant child on Alcatraz just before she's shot with the antidote and rejected by Magneto as no longer a mutant.
   Jean has returned as the Phoenix, a creature of unlimited powers and no control. She wipes out Scott and Professor Charles, and joins up with Magneto. Some mutants embrace the 'cure', others flock to Magneto's protest movement. Magneto is planning to destroy the cure and take over the world.
   Logan invades Magneto's camp but gets the bum's rush. Magneto repositions the Golden Gate bridge to get his mob to Alcatraz. The army uses plastic weapons on the rabble but Magneto's mutants zap them. The X-Men form a defensive line for a huge battle and Warren saves the scientist in charge of the cure. Magneto is exposed to the cure, Jean trashes the Rock but Logan zaps her, and Eric ends up playing chess in the park.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2008) The story starts with 2 boy mutants before the American Civil War. One of them kills his real father for killing the guy he thinks is his father. Both mutants are executed by firing squad in WW2 and recruited into a secret project. Next stop, Nigeria and some serious slaying to get a lump of rock. Then Jimmy Logan quits the gang.
   6 years later, Striker, the head of the project, comes for him when a mutant circus freak is killed. Teyla, Logan's girlfriend, is also a mutant and she is killed by Victor, Logan's boyhood pal. Striker offers him revenge and the chance to save other mutants from the rogue.
   Logan is destroyed to make him indestructible. He escapes when they try to erase his memory. A wise old farmer gives Logan shelter and gets blown away. Logan takes out the kill squad and goes after Victor. Striker is doing experiments on The Island. He thinks he's taking the fight to mutants to save the US of A. He kills the general who tries to shut him down.
   Teyla isn't dead! She's on the island. Logan frees the caged mutants then Striker sets Weapon 11 on him. Then Striker has to resort to adamantine bullets. But Teyla saves the day. Then Xavius (a.k.a. Capt. Picard), takes charge of the mutants, Logan goes his own way and Striker is busted for killing the general.

X-Men: First Class (2011) Poland, 1944, a kid in a concentration camp has strange powers. Erik is investigated by a Nazi, who murders his mother. Westchester, NY, a kid befriends a blue mutant intruder. In 1962, Erik is hunting Nazis and Charles & Raven are at Oxford U. CIA agent McTaggart finds out that there are mutants at the Hellfire Club in Vegas and they want US missiles deployed in Turkey to provoke WW III.
   McTaggart consults Charles (a telepath), who tells her that he thinks nuclear testing triggered a wave of mutants. Erik is no match for the Nazi mutant, Shaw, who killed his mom, and ends up at the CIA's Mutant Division. Shaw is working with the Russians. Charles recruits Erik to a hunt for mutants. The gang goes to Russia and Erik goes rogue.
   Shaw is trying to get Russian missiles into Cuba, hoping that WW 3 would make mutants stronger. He and his gang invade the CIA and leave with the fairy queen. The mutants move to a modest country estate and start training. An alleged cure turns the one with hands for feet into a Blue Beast.
   Professor Charles prevents a US/Russian naval confrontation then neutralized Shaw's submarine. Erik takes revenge for his mother's murder. East & West try to wipe out the mutants and McTaggart shoots Charles whilst trying to kill Erik. He inherits Shaw's gang and the blue lady, Raven.
   Prof. Charles, now in a wheelchair, sets up an academy for mutants. Erik, now Magneto, blasts the diamond lady out of the CIA's bunker and goes his own way.

Xtinction: Predator X (2010) Two cops found a hand on a dock in a Florida swamp then they joined the list of missing persons. Charles, a mad scientist who'd been fired for playing Dr. Frankenclone and trying to recreate the Tasmanian Tiger, wanted to buy land owned by the father of Laura, his ex-wife. There was a monster in the swamp and Charles' thugs were feeding people to it!
   Laura and 2 passengers on her boat were grabbed and woke up in Charles' lab. The sheriff was stranded up a tree when the monster attacked his boat. Laura's male passenger was fed to the monster. The sheriff's dim brother turned up and was captured.
   The prisoners escaped after the bigger thug was eaten, but the sheriff's brother croaked. The surviving thug whistled up another degenerate; Frenchy, Laura's father's assistant, who resented being an unrecognized bastard son of Laura's dad.
   The women were recaptured but the sheriff rescued them. Next job, prevent the monster from giving birth. The sheriff fed Charles to the monster when he tried to do the same to Laura's female passenger, then a gobful of dynamite saw off the monster and splattered everyone with blood & guts.

Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990) is the monster from Alien recovered from a parallel dimension to a vast underground complex, where it runs riot, kills people and gets itself smashed to smithereens by the bloke who is Stringfellow Hawk in Airwolf. Mr. Hawk is brought in because he is the only person who has been to the parallel dimension and returned [in Xtro I]. Lots of arguing between the humans and a bit of aliens bursting out of human bodies but not that much gore and chomping. Lots of shooting, though.

xXx (2002) A spy is killed by Anarchist bad guys so Mr. Gibbons of the NSA decides to send in a snake, not another mouse. He gives the gig to Zander Cage (Vin Diesel), who has xXx tattooed on the back of his neck, after this exhibitionist trashes Senator Dick's car on video for being a dickhead. Testing Cage involves dropping him onto a Colombian drug gang while the local army is cleaning it up (work of fiction, remember?).
Next stop, Prague, where the Secret Service don't want Cage around. Cage does such a great job that Gibbons gives him some spy weapons and tells him to keep digging. Cage catches the head bad guy's girlfriend, Yelena, up to no good and tells her he's a spy. Then someone phones Grigori, the bad guy, and tells him that Cage is a spy.
Gibbons extracts Cage and tells him to go home, knowing Cage will do the opposite. Yelena is an FSB agent and Grigori is planning to launch bio-weapons from a mini-sub. Cage breaks into his castle by parachute & avalanche, Grigori launches his sub and Cage has to chase it down the river Vltava, nearly taking out Prague before he kills it off.

xXx2: The Next Level (2005) BGs wreck a secret NSA underground spy base but the boss and a nerd get away. US agents are being taken out everywhere. The boss goes to see the guy with xXx tattooed on the back of his neck; he's been in gaol for 9 years. But he's now a target so he breaks out of gaol and catches a ride on an escape chopper. xXx burgles the wreck of the base to steal some hard drives. Then he flies a rubber boat onto a bridge to sort out cops giving the nerd a hard time.
   The boss is jumped by the HBG and he gets blown up a bit with his house. The blonde who goes to the funeral gets xXx on her case. xXx is set up for murdering a general but he extracts himself from the crime scene. The nerd comes up with the next target: an aircraft carrier. The boss and all sorts of others, who are supposed to be dead, are prisoners there and the blonde is a BG.
   xXx runs riot in an armoured car. Mucho mayhem. The President wants to turn enemies into allies. George, the HBG, doesn't think that will work and he has a private army of xXx's old buddies to take the blame when he makes his move. The President delivers State of the Onion BS whilst xXx is causing mayhem again.
   Our hero wrecks a half-million dollar car getting onto the train, where the President is being held prisoner. The President is extracted by a guy dangling off a helicopter. xXx jumps off the train just before it and George are blown up. George gets an American hero's funeral.

xXx Return of Xander Cage (2017) A bloke who has invented a gadget for making satellites fall out of orbit and take out an enemy is croaked in a big shoot-out and brawl. Frankenstein goes to South America to grab Xander, who's looking rather ancient, and revive xXx. He insists on picking his own team of weird sidekicks.
Cue a burst of mad driving on land and sea. The BG makes some demands. Cue some pratting about in traffic. Frankenstein decides to take out Xander and his gang and close the xXx programme after she gets her mits on Pandora's Box.
Body armour keeps Xander alive when Frankie tries to do him in. Cue lots more mayhem. Xander crashes Frankie's air force cargo plane into a descending satellite after writing Frankie off. At the end, he stomps on the Box and goes to the inventor's funeral. Surprise! He ain't dead.