Word: mckellen
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...quite mask his loneliness. So when he's flushed down a toilet into the London sewer system, and discovers a complex underworld underground, he is at first horrified, then thrilled to join a plucky rodent named Rita (Kate Winslet) in her comrades' battle against the pompous toad king (Ian McKellen). This, Roddy realizes, is the bustle and agitation he's been missing-the agita and ecstasy of life...
...many distinguished veterans of the Royal Shakesepeare Company does it take to make a bi-g-budget trashy movie? Well, two. Paging Ian McKellen as Magneto. In X2, this evil genius - a Hannibal Lector with preternatural powers - was briefly lured to the side of Good. Now he backslides into his natural malevolence. Donning a mask that looks like the one South Park's Butters wears when he turns into Professor Chaos, Magneto performs one impressive fit of mischief: he teleports one end of the Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito to Alcatraz...
...McKellen does another fine job in what has become his second career: infusing a bluff, wily menace into blockbusters in need of some perking up. (By Monday, given his appearances in X3 and The Da Vinci Code, this eminent Shakespearean is likely to become the movie actor seen by the most paying customers in a single weekend...
...Paul Bettany) and rival gangs of learned loonies, all in search of Christ's Holy Grail--has some superficial bustle, but essentially it's a course in speculative religious and art history. Somebody talks, the others listen. Those lectures give most of the actors little to do. Ian McKellen, as a crotchety charmer, fares best, because he does most of the talking. Bettany, finding poignancy in murder and masochism, comes in second...
...Saving Private Ryan but just registers as numb here. The villains fare a bit better. Bettany gets some poignance out of his role as self-flagellator and avenging devil, and Alfred Molina, as an Opus Dei poobah, plays liturgical corruption as if he were an Enron exec in robes. McKellen, a pro's pro, lends suavity and power to the Leigh Teabing role (a character Brown named for two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail). Yet when he delivers the film's dead-serious climactic line - "You're the last living descendant of Jesus Christ...