X-MEN: FIRST CLASS My rating: B-
132 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
There are moments in “X-Men: First Class” that are so good they almost don’t belong in a superhero movie.
This is a backhanded compliment, I know. But that’s how I feel about the genre — the less it’s like a superhero movie, the better.
And before it backslides into the usual cliches, “First Class” delivers some very interesting stuff.
Director Matthew Vaughn (“Kick-Ass”) and his five co-writers (among them Bryan Singer) give us an origins story about the earliest days of the group of specially-talented mutants who would eventually become the X-Men.
In a World War II prologue set in a Nazi concentration camp, an officious Dr. Mengele type (Kevin Bacon, speaking German with subtitles) tries to nudge one of his young inmates into demonstrating his remarkable ability to manipulate metals.
This passage is striking both for the cleverness of its dialogue and for the almost unbearable atmosphere of suspense and moral revulsion it elicits. It reminds a whole lot of the farmhouse episode that opened Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” And that’s saying something.
Cut to 1962. The little boy in the concentration camp has grown up to be Erik Lehnsherr (the future Magneto for those not well-versed in the Marvel Universe). He’s played Michael Fassbender (Rochester in the recent “Jane Eyre”), and he’s on a quest to track down and kill the man who tortured him and murdered his mother. There’s a tasty scene in which he settles scores with a couple of fugitive Nazis in a bar in Argentina.
Meanwhile, in a nifty segment right out of the James Bond playbook (Sean Connery era), CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) strips to her undies and poses as a hooker to infiltrate the Hellfire Club, a bunch of rogue millionaires with political ambitions. Among them we recognize Sebastian Shaw (Bacon once again), who doesn’t appear to have aged at all since we saw him back in WW2.
In fact, he and his colleagues exhibit alarming superhuman powers. Realizing that Shaw is planning a worldwide catastrophe, Agent MacTaggert looks for expert help –– and turns to university geneticist Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his “sister” Raven (Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar nominee this year for “Winter’s Bone”).
We already know and MacTaggert will soon learn that Charles is a world-class mind reader and that Raven is actually a scaly, blue-skinned creature capable of mimicking any other human form.
Brought together by the CIA, Charles and Erik seek out other mutants in order to build a team that can do battle with the scheming Shaw. Raven finds herself falling for one of them, a geeky genius (Nicholas Hoult) who has hands where his feet should be. It’s a nice little love story.
All the while Shaw is putting together an international incident that will destabilize civilization and allow him to seize power: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The first half of “X-Men: First Class” is pretty good. But once the story gets diluted by the addition of a bunch of young mutants (aside from their powers, they’re not at all memorable) and the usual climactic f/x cataclysm, the film loses its dramatic edge.
This is particularly unfortunate because this is the point in the story where longstanding rivalries are established. Turning their backs on Charles, Erik and Raven assume the alter egos of Magneto and Mystique and declare war on humanity.
But Vaughn and crew somehow fumble the drama here; the characters’ transformations from good guys to bad buys are just too abrupt to carry much psychological or emotional truth.
For all that, “First Class” generally is well acted and features a slew of familiar faces: Oliver Platt, January Jones, Matt Craven, James Remar, Ray Wise and especially Hugh Jackman, who’s only onscreen for about 10 seconds but delivers one of the film’s best moments. BEST. CAMEO. EVER.
| Robert W. Butler
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