First up, Abominable Snowcone:

I’m not sure why I put off seeing X-Men First Class.  The prequel didn’t have as huge a debut as the other X-Movies, but reviews have been very positive overall and—unlike the other entries in the franchise—this baby has legs.  When it hits DVD I’m all over that shit like awesome on Patrick Swayze.

So I went out last night to check Matt Vaughan’s (Snatch, Kick-Ass) take on the nascent days of Charles Xavier’s School for Ostracized Young People with Wacky Powers.  And I freaking LOVED it.  Forget Green Lantern and Thor; this is the superhero movie of the summer.  Captain America might be good, but shee-it, it’ll have to work wonders to come off as smartly and sensationally as this ensemble adventure.  Well, okay, don’t completely forget Green Lantern; it’s a guilty pleasure.

But onto X-Men.  We’re given a retread of the opening sequence of the first X-Men film (1999) where young Erik Lensher and his parents are processed at a Nazi camp in 1944.  We see the whole magnetic gate-bending bit again, but then Vaughan shows us what came later, when Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) forces Erik to perform magnetic magic tricks under pressure.  Turns out only anger will motivate the young mutant to move metal around.  We’re given a dose of German with subtitles. Later, there’s some Russian.  I liked how the filmmakers were okay with this, not insulting the audience.  YES, they’re German!  They won’t sprechens ingles!

Meanwhile, back in New York, young (hairy and fully mobile) Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of a prowler.  He initially sees what appears to be his mother in the kitchen.  Ah, but the snooty mom in this rich family couldn’t even find the fucking kitchen, so Charles knows something is up.  Turns out the imposter is young Raven (Mystique), a wayward girl hungry and without a home.  Charles takes her in.  There’s no explanation of whether his parents were okay with this; we just assume it was cool.  Haven’t you always wanted a pet telepath?  Especially one who grows up to be Rebecca Romijn?  Fuuuuhck!

Jump to 1962.  Shaw—a dangerous mutant who can harness energy and redirect it—is head of the Hellfire Club.  He hopes to get the world powers to blow each other to bits with atomic weapons so he can lead a new world, where only mutants survive.  Sound familiar?  Yeah—this is how Erik (Magneto, Michael Fassbender) comes across in the other X-Men films.  Now we see where he purloined his philosphy.  Apart from being nearly invincible himself, Shaw has three henchmen.  Azazel is a red-devil version of Nightcrawler—a teleporter who is skilled with bladed weapons.  In the comics, depending on what storyline you’re in, Azazel actually IS Kurt’s dad.  Riptide is an Antonio Banderas-looking fellow who can spin around like the Tasmanian Devil.  And probably make a mean fajita.  Then there’s Emma Frost, a telepath who can also turn her body into diamonds.  I can’t recall whether this is supposed to be the same character as the younger girl in X-Men: Wolverine (or an ancestor), and I guess it doesn’t matter.  Anyway, Erik menaces the Russian military into shipping ICBMs to Cuba to wind the doomsday clock, until it’s two minutes to midnight.  Yeah, like the Iron Maiden song.  President Kennedy responds exactly the way history has shown he did—with a blockade.

Erik is now in his early-mid thirties and has a hard-on for killing Shaw to avenge his family and—by extension—all Jew-Poles who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.  There’s a great scene at an Argentine bar where Erik finds a couple ex-Nazi thugs and uses his magnetic powers to zing a knife at them.  Not long thereafter, Erik nearly drowns trying to stop Shaw’s submarine.  Charles—recruited by CIA agent Moira McTaggert—saves and befriends him, then argues they should find other mutants so they have a chance of stopping Shaw from starting WWIII.  Erik agrees, but does so without relenting in his quest for vengeance.  Actually, finding an “army” of mutants is Erik’s idea.

Moira introduces Charles to young scientist Hank McCoy, a human-looking mutant with acrobatic powers, who has developed a working version of Cerebro.  He probably also invented a VHS machine and the Atari 5200 game platform; dude is WAY ahead of his time.  Charles uses Cerebro to locate other mutants, who he and Erik recruit during a fun montage.  Said sequence includes a hilarious cameo from a familiar X-Man that I hadn’t heard about.  It’s quite funny—and the appearance of said character is accompanied by the film’s only F-bomb.  Why nobody uses Cerebro to spy on hot chicks or get the winning lottery numbers is beyond me.  Hank’s probably done it.

Anyway, Charles and Erik get a small gaggle of muties together.  They’re kids, really, and not very good at using their powers.  And there’s a moment where I wondered, shee-it, couldn’t Charles find even a half-dozen mutants who were ALREADY good at using their powers?  But that makes too much sense and would have killed this story.  So just go with it; it’s one of only a few times you’ll have to suspend disbelief here.  So the titular “first class” includes Beast (Hank), Banshee (a kid with a supersonic scream), Angel (a stripper chick with wings), Havoc (a teen boy who shoots energy by wiggling his hips, like he’s hula-hooping), and Darwin (a boy whose body can adapt in all sorts of ways to threats in the environment).  Then of course there’s Raven, Charles, and Erik.

I should mention here that Darwin is the only black character.  And we KNOW what happens to the lone black character in ensemble movies like this.

So anyhow, these newbie muties hang out practicing their shit at Oliver Platt’s secret CIA installation.  At least until Azazel and Riptide show up and totally wreck the place, killing about 30 human federal agents in the process.  Remember that great sequence at the beginning of X2 where Nightcrawler infiltrates the White House?  It’s kinda like that, only Azazel uses bladed weapons and leaves a red vapor trail whenever he BAMPFs back and forth.  It’s like, BAMPF BAMPF BAMPF and they don’t SEE anything, so nobody knows what the hell is going on.  It’s done quite well.  And while all of this is happening, the X-Teens literally cower in their rec center in terror.  At first you’re like, what the fuck?  DO SOMETHING!  But then you realize how green they are, and scared.  Azazel and Riptide are clearly older and more practiced with their powers.  And when Shaw arrives, no one can challenge him.  Well, okay, ONE does.  And pays for it.  Shaw invites the mutants to join his Hellfire Club and fight the humans, who according to him will never accept their kind.  At least one of the teens takes him up on his offer.  Charles and Erik weren’t around during this attack, so they couldn’t help the kids.  I forget what they were doing.  At the race track.  Doesn’t matter, fuck it.

But given that their HQ is in shambles, Charles offers his mansion as a new training center for the group.  And train they must if they’re to confront the Hellfire Club with any hope of defeating them.  DO or DO NOT; there is no TRY.  Charles is a good coach.  He inspires the kids, gets them to focus.  Erik, on the other hand, is precisely the kind of douchebag who’ll teach a toddler how to swim by rowing them out to the middle of a lake and tossing them overboard—which he essentially does to Banshee at one point.

Okay, so Russian and U.S. naval fleets have a showdown south of Florida, and Shaw’s team arrives in his sub to make sure the confrontation gets out of hand.  But Charles and his gang fly down in Hank’s modified super-sonic Lockheed to intercept.  Which leads to the ass-kicking finale wherein all the mutants get to show off a bit.  I’d say more but don’t want to give anything away.  I will, however, say that Michael Fucking Ironside appears as a navy captain, who informs us it’s been a pleasure serving with us.  Feeling’s mutual sir—from Klendathau to Cuba.  And Mars.

X-Men is smart, but goofy enough.  Really catered to the old comics crowd, right down to the silly authenticity of Banshee’s “wings.”  Nice cameo by Wolverine–I had no idea that was coming.  Whole thing had a nice retro vibe, being set around the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kinda James Bond meets X-Men 2.  Bacon was a pretty nasty baddie.

It wasn’t lost on me that the black guy was killed off first, like in an old horror movie.  Part of me said, well there weren’t that many minorities in the original comics anyway, another part said oh c’mon that aint right.  At least the mix of boys and girls was about even, not that balance should be forced.

I kinda liked that some effects were a little cheesy, like the Beast costume.  The old fuddy duddy purist in me was like, “Man in ape suit!”  and that was okay with me for a change, instead of CGI-ing the hell outta him.  ‘Course, with Emma Frost’s diamond-mode, there’s not much else you CAN do but CGI, and that was fine.

So yeah, I enjoyed it.  Well-written, I thought.  Good use of powers at the right times.  It felt like people who knew the characters had some say in it.  They didn’t gloss over the anger Erik felt, and how it motivated him.  Nice “coin” killing, well done the way they have Charles on the outside, knowing what’s happening but unable to prevent it.   The end dovetail nicely with the first X-Men, what with setting the characters where they need to be, including in wheelchairs.  But left room for another adventure or two in the 70s-early 80s if they wanted, still pre-Xmen

Made me feel a little old, though!  Some of those X-Men kids weren’t even born until I was in college.  Which means they weren’t around until like, 30 years after those comics came out, yet there they were, portraying characters I read about eons ago.  Which also means I’m like, old.  James McAvoy (Charles) and Michael Fassbender (Erik) were quite good, and fortunately they’re not so famous yet that their faces take you out of the movie.  Indeed, I didn’t recognize any of these people save Bacon and Oliver Platt.  Fassbender was apparently in Inglorious Bastards—but I didn’t immediately spot him for that.

BAMPF!

 

3.5 fists out of 5

 

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Not that there’s much more to add after that, but here are the Donor’s thoughts:

 

The interesting thing about X-Men: First Class was that even though Kevin Bacon wasn’t the best thing in it, he had two of the best scenes in the movie.  The opening with a young Erik and Sebastian Shaw was pretty goddamn epic.  And while Danny will probably call it forced drama bullshit, I thought it was a spectacularly effective way to show the seeds being planted of Erik’s hatred for humanity and everyone on his shit list.  The rage that Erik unleashes when Shaw shoots his mother (because he was unable to move a coin) is actually sort of goddamn terrifying.  And the glee on Shaw’s face as helmets crush Nazi skulls and his laboratory is turned into a scrap heap is oddly delightful.

 

That is sadly the best origin in this origin story.  When, as a young boy, Charles Xavier meets Raven (Mystique) who is rummaging through the family fridge, it is a less than stellar introduction of two mutants who thought they were alone in the world.  The relationship between Charles and Raven does develop into something a little more interesting over time mostly thanks to some great acting by James McAvoy and hottie du jour Jennifer Lawrence.  Their chemistry salvages an fairly mundane series of scenes as Charles tries to pick up chicks in bars and the pair are eventually recruited by the CIA.  Meanwhile, Erik Lensherr’s story continues to charge forward like a juggernaut with Michael Fassbender doing a superb job of keeping his rage right beneath the surface and then unshackling it with extreme ferocity when he finally catches up with the poor bastards in cahoots with Shaw.  The massacre at the lodge in Argentina is also the best action set piece Matthew Vaughn pulls out of his bag of tricks, even though it’s the briefest.

 

That brings me to another problem with the movie.  While Vaughn is clearly a competent director, he suffers from Nolan-itis in that he hasn’t a clue about how to shoot a kinetic, visceral action scene.  The close quarters intimacy of the lodge slaughter indicates the smaller the scale, the more capable Vaughn becomes at making us feel like we’re a part of the carnage.  As soon as the action shifts to larger sets, like the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation between the U.S., Russia and the mutants, both good and bad, everything feels jagged and detached.

 

And then there’s the rest of the mutants.  Shaw has assembled a small band of badasses and other than Emma Frost, played by a cringe worthy January Jones, we don’t learn anything about the tornado tossing Riptide or teleporting Azazel.  I realize that not every character in a movie deserves an arc, but take five seconds to let us know they like kittens and drink red wine with fish.  Anything to make their characters even remotely interesting.  Xavier’s collection of mutants don’t fare much better.  Save for the aforementioned Mystique, we’re introduced to several mutants who are given no backstory and who all have such vanilla flavored powers that a game of Hungry Hippos is more exciting than the eventual confrontation between them and Shaw’s goons.

 

The semi-nifty looking but sterile confrontation between the mutants amidst the opposing U.S./Russian fleets off the coast of Cuba does manage to end in what is the second best scene  in the movie.  Lensherr finally confronts Shaw and what he does with the coin he couldn’t move as a child is totally fucking epic.

 

Considering this is a prequel, we all know that at some point Lensherr goes to the dark side and Xavier ends up in a wheel chair.  And yet after spending the second half of the film developing a pretty decent friendship between the future foes, the writers, the studio, the director, whoever, decide that they have to rush to the obvious and have Magneto don the helmet and turn Xavier into a guy “who can’t shit, who can’t hump, who wears fucking diapers, mang!”  Even The Neck knew to draw it out over three movies before stuffing Anakin’s melon into the mask.

 

So what’s the bottom line?  While it sounds like I hated the movie, there’s actually enough good stuff here to salvage it and make it passable entertainment.  McAvoy and Fassbender (especially Fassbender) elevate material that in lesser hands wouldn’t have a great deal of emotional punch.  As a standalone movie it’s something I might revisit if I was entertaining company that hadn’t seen it.  If it becomes the first part of a prequel trilogy that finds a way to get better, then this becomes the superhero equivalent of The Phantom Menace.  You’ll sit through it to enjoy the entire ride, bumps and all.

 

3 fists out of 5