X-Men: First Class
Regal 14, June 3, 2011
Movie #33 for 2011
Was I really going to go and see the fifth X-Men movie after the last two (X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) were so very, very bad? With a cast like that, hells yes I was.
Hollywood loves a superhero origin story, and the X-Men franchise just keeps on giving. Here, though, they go right back to the origin stories of Professor X and Magneto - the old farts in the first X-Men film - and, apparently, the start of the mutant phenomenon.
Charles Xavier (JAMES McAVOY, pictured, Atonement), Erik Lehnsherr (MICHAEL FASSBENDER, Hunger), Raven (JENNIFER LAWRENCE, Winter’s Bone) and Hank McCoy (NICHOLAS HOULT, A Single Man) team up with some young people with new and extraordinary abilities to stop Shaw (KEVIN BACON), Emma Frost (JANUARY JONES, “Mad Men”) and their crew from manipulating the US and Russia towards the Cuban Missile Crisis and a nuclear war that will destroy the human race.
As narratives go, it’s pretty straightforward, but much of the film is overplotted and there are a bunch of characters that add too much flab to the key story of Charles and Erik. McAvoy and Fassbender are great. Without them, the film would be terrible (although possibly still unintentionally funny because of Bacon).
Written by the same crew who wrote Thor (haven’t they been busy?) with a pretty flabby middle section, but directed with energy and style by MATTHEW VAUGN (Stardust, Kick-Ass) the film falls somewhere pretty squarely between the earlier and latter films in quality, if not chronology.
