X-Men: First Class

Rating: ****

Astonishing! Astounding! Uncanny! Three word X-Men fans might use about X-Men: First Class.

Surprised? So was I. This superhero franchise, desperately in need of a booster jump following the creative catastrophe of Last Stand, and the critical and commercial bomb of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, managed to do the impossible: deliver a Marvel film that contains no foreshadowing about The Avengers.

But seriously, Matthew Vaughn has managed to rejuvenate the X-Men brand and does so by breaking one of the assumptions in making a prequel – it can’t be surprising. Set against the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film has the feeling that someone transplanted the X-Men into the world of Sean Connery’s James Bond with sexy villainesses, exotic locales, and the world destroying threat of nuclear war. Scoff you may at the very notion, but the X-Men comics have spanned numerous genres, from space opera (anything with the Shi’ar and the Starjammers), to science fiction (“Days of Future Past”), to political commentary (“God Loves, Man Kills”) to horror (“Inferno”) and even humour (“X-Babies”).

Part origin story, part spy thriller, part relationship drama and part superhero movie, X-Men: First Class combines all these elements and cooks them to perfection. The film is a beautiful soufflé of inspirations and ideas, not necessarily perfect, but wholly satisfying. Anchored by a great cast, solid direction and a tremendous eye for period detail and the requisite visual effects eye candy, it might be safe to say that X-Men delivers the first, great blockbuster of the summer season with very few reservations.

This film starts out very similarly to Bryan Singer’s initial X-film in 2000. A young Erik Lehnsherr is separated from his family as they enter a Nazi Concentration Camp in Poland, during which young Erik first demonstrates his gift to manipulate metal. He’s brought to a doctor named Schmidt who tries to test the boy by threatening to kill his mother, and when Erik is unable to move a coin, Schmidt shoots Mrs. Lehnsherr, unleashing Erik’s wrath. Good, says Schmidt, your hate has made you powerful… Oh wait, wrong movie.

By contrast, young Charles Xavier has had an easy life. He awakes one night to a noise in his kitchen. He comes downstairs expecting to find a burglar, but instead finds his mother rummaging in the pantry. Wait a minute, says Charles, my mom’s never been inside our kitchen in her life… Presto-chango, his mother morphs into an adorable little blue-skinned Mystique. The two become fast friends as Charles promises that the runaway Mystique need never to go hungry again. But again, that’s the wrong movie.

From there, the film follows Xavier through his schooling at Oxford and Erik through his globe-trotting revenge tour to eliminate the Nazis made his life a living hell. The two catch up while independently pursuing the same man, Schmidt, who’s really Sebastian Shaw, a mutant with global domination on his bucket list. Erik wants the man that shot his mother in cold blood, Charles is helping the CIA stop an imminent threat to world peace. The two men form a bond despite their different goals, for they both agree on one thing, mutants are the future.

One of the reasons that the initial trilogy of X-Men films worked so well, was because of the casting of classically trained actors to play Xavier and Magneto, Patrick Stewart as and Ian McKellen respectively. They brought such gravitas and realism to the parts that it was going to hard to find young actors who could not only match them, but make it believable that these are their younger versions.

But James McAvoy brings surprising charm to Xavier, who in First Class is still has that optimism and humanist spirit known to be Xavier, while letting Professor X have a scene or two where he tries to pick up women with a biology lesson. As his opposite, Michael Fassbender brings a nice tone of menace to Magneto, but also a weird kind of hopefulness as he finds his purpose as mutantkind’s saviour. If any actor will benefit the most from First Class it will be Fassbender. Like Hugh Jackman in the first X-Men, this movie could launch Fassbender to the A-list.

The supporting cast is top notch. Kevin Bacon as Shaw is especially a standout, chewing the scenery with relish and striding across the screen with the swagger of an old-fashioned Bond villain. Bacon may have always been a solid actor and pop culture curio, but there’s something magnetic about how he plays Shaw. There’s a different kind of magnetism when it comes to Shaw’s girl Friday, Emma Frost, as personified by January Jones, and if you’ve seen the pictures then you know why. Frost seems to get lost in the shuffle in the film’s last act, but Jones brings a fine touch of coolness and clinical detachment – along with her physical attributes – to the role.

Oddly enough, the weakest bits of the story in X-Men: First Class have to do with the first class of X-Men. Jennifer Lawrence brings some new dimension to Mystigue by making her more than the “naked blue chick,” and Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast plays well the mutant struggle to be normal and the dual effort to accept and be accepted, and trying to change without changing. The rest of the first class get a moment or two to shine, but both the first battle with these X-Men and the scene of their training is kind of truncated to an uncomfortable level, but if that’s all it takes to keep the story moving, I don’t have that big a problem with it.

But there is far more to love in X-Men: First Class then there is to complain about. It’s an inventive way to jumpstart a stolid franchise, and it leaves the doors open to pursue further adventures from the X-Men’s past. An excellent summer blockbuster with brains, heart and courage. A triple threat.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Rating: **1/2

Yay, the summer movie season is here with its proverbial geek-gasm of offerings from enterprises to terminators to transformers to angels and demons. Unfortunately, the excitement that began Friday was tempered after the lights rose and the curtain fell on X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In what should have been the spin-off with the greatest potential for stand-alone franchise status ends up getting buried under the weight of its own good intentions. Further, in what’s billed as a stand alone movie showcasing Hugh Jackman as the mutant fury with steel claws is reposition as basically the Destroy all Monsters of X-Men films.

Basically, it seems that anyone that couldn’t be sandwiched into the previous three X-Men films was put to the forefront here whether they fit or not. The result is either well done (Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool) or handled clumsily (like the appearances of Gambit and Emma Frost). Frustratingly, the pedigree was there to really make this thing sing, and putting Live Schrieber in the claws of Sabretooth gave just the right gravitas to the character to make him a true threat, both physically and psychologically, for Wolverine. Jackson, of course, knows this character inside and out, and when he’s allowed to be Wolverine he doesn’t fail to deliver.

And for a film with “Origins” in the title, there seems to be no indication that the filmmakers seem to care to know what makes Wolverine “the best at what he does.” It’s just easier to jettison character development and true discovery in favour of another kick ass action sequence, which truthfully I don’t think were really all that great. Although they try, the Wolverine/Sabretooth dynamic seems to boil down to “let’s fight”/“them’s fightin’ words” whenever the two of them find themselves in the same room. Similarly I found that other characters had highlights of possibility, from Will I Am’s Kenobi-esque John Wraith and Reynold’s Merc with the Mouth. (When he has a mouth that is. Don’t ask.)

Comically speaking, and I mean the books not jokes, the script crams the 6-issue Origin miniseries into about three minutes at the top of the show. Then we get this really beautifully-made montage of the various battlefields Wolverine and Sabretooth fought across for over a hundred years. That was good stuff, in fact even the scenes post the introduction of William Stryker (played here by Danny Huston) and his mutant mercenary team are pretty good. But when Wolverine walks away and settles for the quiet life of an Alberta lumberjack with Silver Fox (Lynn Collins), the film seems to loose its mind with all the talking about feelings and such. Naturally, Silver Fox is removed rather quickly.

But hey, we get Gambit finally in what’s pretty much an extended cameo practically shoe-horned into an already dense script. Now I’ve never watched Friday Night Lights, but I certainly hope that whatever affectation Taylor Kitsch puts on in that show is better than his New Orleans accent here. Kevin Durand as the Blob is also kind of shafted, being simply a name to fill a spot on the roster; he gets maybe two scenes. And as you may have guess from the trailer, Young Cyclops (Tim Pocock) is somehow, inexplicably, part of Stryker’s plan to create a composite mutant with many powers. (Strange though that he didn’t remember this experience when all that stuff went down in X2.) He never sees Wolverine of course, a blinder meant to stop his eye phasers being the cause, but the whole thing had the stink of C-3PO’s mind being conveniently erased in Revenge of the Sith.

A startling lack of cohesion is at work here. In mistaking petty details for savvy script-writing, the filmmakers overcompensate for their lack of vision with bloated action and supposed Easter Eggs for the fans who’ll see right through them as pandering, Wolverine’s solo exploits in the comics are rarely epic, but much more personal involving either a mystery about his forgotten past or some kind of vendetta mission; trying to make this just another X-Men story was a miscalculation. Wolverine should have gone the Iron Man route: small cast with a focus on character before action set pieces. Prequels are tough, following on the heels of a successful series is tough, but this effort, if you’re a fan of either Bryan Singer’s movies or the comic books they’re based on, will not leave you wanting more.