The original X-Men movie broke new ground in a number of ways, capitalizing on the early success of Blade to bring Marvel characters into the mainstream in a big way for the first time since The Incredible Hulk series of the 1970s. But not every moment was golden, and one ill-conceived line, in particular, started out bad and has only grown worse over the years. It’s Storm’s infamous would-be zinger “do you know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?” and it remains one of the weirdest threats ever issued in the movies.
As it turns out, the moment stemmed from more than just awkward screenwriting. The line was intended to be a casual dismissal of the scene’s villain, Toad. Storm’s final rebuke couldn’t be presented that way, since it constituted the amphibious villain’s final defeat. And that set it up for infamy in ways that weren’t entirely its fault.
The scene in question entails the climactic battle at the Statue of Liberty, as the X-Men confront and defeat various members of Magneto’s Brotherhood. Storm dispatches Toad with a massive bolt of lightning, just after delivering the line: answering her own question with “the same thing that happens to everything else.” It carries all the snap and wit of a lead balloon and derails what is otherwise a terrific payoff to their battle.
It’s certainly not the first lousy line in a superhero movie, nor will it be the last. The DCEU has its own version with the repeated cry of “Martha!” in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, while the Joel Schumacher Batman pictures carry a number of cringe-worthy lines. Superheroic dialogue requires a certain cadence, and if they’re misplayed -- either by the written script or the performance -- the necessary gravitas becomes a joke.
The fault apparently lies with writer Joss Whedon, who admitted that he wrote in a 2001 interview with The Onion AV Club. He was involved in early scripts of the film which were gradually revised until only a few of his original lines were left, and one of them was the line about toads. Rumors held that Toad himself asked several rhetorical questions earlier in the script as a way of taunting his opponents. Whether they existed or not, they were dropped with the bulk of Whedon’s script, leaving the line hanging awkwardly with no support.
In the interview, Whedon casts blame on Halle Berry, who played Storm. He claims it was intended to be delivered casually, with nonchalance and that Berry played it “like she was Desdemona.” Looking at the scene, however, a casual delivery simply wouldn’t have worked. Toad had quickly incapacitated both Scott and Jean and proved more than game when taking on Storm herself. Berry’s ultra-serious delivery -- while it added to the line’s infamy -- matched the literal hurricane of her superpowers on display and epic life-or-death circumstances of the movie’s climax. The line itself should have been changed, but the actor’s choice of delivery had nothing to do with it.
Whedon has subsequently suffered infamy of his own, but before then, his screenwriting prowess was enough to take responsibility for the line without an attendant loss in reputation. But the most likely culprit is probably the filmmaking process itself, in which dialogue from a very different version of the story somehow makes its way into the final product without the context that might have made it work. For whatever reason, the line remained as one small part of an otherwise very strong movie that’s remembered for all the wrong reasons.