I love Swankmotron. He has great taste in movies, even if I don’t share all of his prequel love or absolute hatred of Pirates of the Carribean. Generally, he’s pointed in the right direction on movies. And he was right on in his review of X-men First Class (which you really should’ve read), with a couple of exceptions I take with his effusiveness over this summer geekfest.
This is undoubtedly the summer of the geek: Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern, Super 8, Cowboys and Aliens. . . and the film I was most worried about was X-men First Class. This franchise has faltered in its last two outings (X-men 3: The Last Stand and X-men: Origins: Wolverine: The Search for More Colons and Subtitles) Both of those films had good things to offer, but both ended up kind of flopping limply into mediocrity.
Contrast this with my love for 2000’s original X-men and X2: X-men United, which rank in my top 10 and #2 favorite comic-based movies of all time, respectively. The summer of 2003 I went to the movies at least once a week, and before or after every other movie I saw, Id try to walk in to screenings of X2 just to catch another 5-10 minutes of it, always trying to get another look at the mansion fight, Colossus armoring up, Wolverine going all berserker rage, the opening break-in to the White House, the fight in the jets, etc. I went to see it total at least a half dozen times in the theater on top of that.
X-men: First Class is a return to greatness for this film franchise. One must first credit Producer Bryan Singer, who was able to bring a story and a feel much more in line with his first two outings. Second, you have to tip your hat to Matthew Vauhn, the director, for delivering and being able to pack more heart and guts into a superhero movie than we’ve had in a long while. Third, this script is amazing. A lot of humor. A few sly winks at the audience and fans, but ones that don’t present themselves so obviously as “Ah? Eh? See what we’re doing? That’s for you, fanboys!” It’s much more subtle. This script is all killer no filler. Even after seeing this movie twice (once at a press screening and once at the premiere midnight showing) I could not pick out any part that was padded or filling– a true rarity for a summer blockbuster action movie that clocks in at over 2 hours. Every scene has a purpose, every purpose is a note, or a beat, or a character point, or pushes the plot forward with amazing action. And fourth and finally, this cast, with few exceptions, delivers the goods. A few words about them:
Stepping into roles played by greats like Ian Mckellen, Patrick Stewart, and a bad guy like Brian Cox in X2 sets an incredibly high bar. And don’t get me wrong here, I still think Ian Mckellen > Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart > James Mcavoy, and Brian Cox > Kevin Bacon. I really have to disagree with Swank’s proclamation that Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw in his first scene is near as good as Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. Very similar, and there’s room for comparison, but this Sebastian Shaw is more Bond Villain than evil sociopath Jew hunter Nazi. And in that he is perfect. It seems silly nowadays that a villain would want to irradiate the gold supply like Goldfinger, but Bacon’s Shaw is the kind of megalomaniacal genius who would come up with an audacious plan to start a nuclear war between the US and Russia in order to kill off most humans, leaving behind only mutants whom he could rule over. Nowadays Bond villains are so much more subtle, but in the 60’s, you had to have an audacous plan. Perfect execution on this point and a pitch-perfect performance by Kevin Bacon to deliver on this without making Shaw either too campy and over the top or sinister.
And I mentioned that Ian Mckellen > Michael Fassbender and Patrick Stewart > James Mcavoy,but somehow in this film Fassbender + Mcavoy > Mckellen + Stewart. These two young actors have almost a bromance, and it’s really fun to see them as friends, and it’s really painful to see them at their most vulnerable and then at each others throats. Fassbender puts on the best performance in a movie of this type of the year. And inasmuch as Shaw is a Bond villain, he plays someone both suave and efficiently brutal enough to be James Bond out of Fleming’s novels. If Daniel Craig decides to retire as Bond, Fassbender would make a great replacement.
So? What else is good? Charles Xavier trying to be suave, talking about “groovy” mutations. The 60’s vibe and how it blends with modern sensibilities, especially in a few exposition spots brilliantly told through historical footage or through faux 1960’s educational/propoganda films: especially the one where Sebastian Shaw explains his big plan. Great use of period music, especially a scene featuring -NR5MvETpY”>Keith Mansfield’s “Junior Jet Set”... except it feels and sounds much more like the sampled version Gnarls Barkley used in “Run,” again mixing old and new.
THE ACTION SEQUENCES. We got to see a tiny snippet of how brutal and amazing a fighter a teleporter could be with Nightcrawler in X2. But Azazael, including his red skin, is all demon, all killer, all brutal. Amazing.
GREAT cameos: an all-too-brief appearance by Ray Wise as Secretary of State Dean Rusk. And Swank alluded to the best use of the “f” word in a PG-13 movie ever: spot on- and I won’t spoil that any more that that.
And little allusions to future civil rights issues: Charles Xavier and Eric play chess on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where, ostensibly, a few years from now Martin Luther King will proclaim he has a dream. Wordplay around “don’t ask, don’t tell” and “mutant and proud”, which may as well be, “I’m black and proud.”
What wasn’t so good? January Jones. She sticks out like a sore thumb. I don’t even understand why people think she’s that attractive, and you could’ve done much better with other girls to fill out that Emma Frost White Queen outfit. Beast’s final costume. When a lot of the fiasco that happened over promotional material coming out, one of us robots (I think Jerk Bot) said that Beast looked “rapey” and like he was about to tell the Scarecrow and Tin Man to put up their dukes– and I think he still looks rapey, and he looks and talks like a cross between a blue Teen Wolf and Cornelius from the 1960s Planet of the Apes. His mouth just doesn’t move correctly, like Cornelius. By contrast, the X3 version of Beast looked better, frankly. HOWEVER, he ended up being one of my favorite characters in the film, and certainly has among the most interesting character journeys of the film. So, the Oscar for makeup and costumes should not go to Beast, but extra props to Nicholas Hoult for trying to act under all of that and still doing a great job. So there’s a silver lining to this cloud, the same way as the silver lining to the Emma Frost cloud is she just doesn’t get much screen time. Thank. You.
This film is a perfect summer movie. Now, to you comic book nerds and continuity hounds, just forget everything else. YES, this is not the First Class of the comic books. Yes, there are some things that contradict stuff from the other movies. That’s fine. Just like Batman Begins was not the same as Batman: Year One and just like it changed the Batman origin story from the Tim Burton Batman movies, this is a reboot. Relax and have a great time. Save the continuity nitpicking for the comic book store, where I’ll gladly meet you and tell you what a great film X-men First Class is.
3 1/2 stars