Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

Welcome back Singer.

Bryan Singer returns to 20th Century Fox's X-Men franchise with X-Men: First Class and boy am I glad he did. Singer directed 2000's X-Men and it's amazing sequel, 2003's X2. I remember spending a lifetime trying to stream the trailer for X-Men on my AOL 56K connection. I remember shitting bricks when I saw how badass Nightcrawler was in X2. That was all thanks to Singer. Bryan Singer made the first two X-men films so awesome. Then he bailed on his hit franchise to helm the GOD AWFUL Superman Returns flick. Worst of all, he took James Mardsen/Cyclops with him! The X-Men saga crashed and burned after Singer's departure. X-Men: The Last Stand was a joke and that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is one of the worst on screen film abortions I've ever seen. Thankfully, Singer is back for this latest X-Men installment. Ok, so he's not directing, but Singer's role as producer still counts for something! You'll see...

I knew things were off to a good start when the opening scene of First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn, was a shot for shot re-shoot of the opening from Bryan Singer's original X-Men. This all important scene was like a silent nod, reminding the loyal X-fans (geeks) that the good guys were back and that this new X-Men flick would wash away the sins of the last two shit-fests and erase them from our collective memory, Men In Black style.

New kids on the block

The plot isn't really the film's strong point so I'll just gloss over it briefly. The film takes places in the 1960's. Magneto and Professor X aren't enemies yet and actually work together to train a bunch of young mutants how to control their powers while also trying to stop Kevin Bacon from starting WWIII (yeah...what?).

Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the performances. First, Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Magneto is off the hook. This guy seriously steals the entire movie. He displays far more depth and emotion in his role than anyone else in any of the previous X-films. Also, the dude speaks four different languages in this movie (German, French, Spanish and English) and got me thinking I was watching Inglorious Basterds for a second. Then I realized that Fassbender WAS in Inglorious Basterds and started liking First Class even more because of it. Next, Kevin Bacon's spin on the Hellfire Club's Sebastian Shaw was pretty entertaining. It really just amounts to Kevin Bacon acting like a pimp on the big screen for a couple of hours, but damn he seems cool and he pulls off the multilingual thing pretty well too (German, Russian, English). I'm just glad he wasn't wearing Shaw's usual George Washington style get up I'm accustomed to.

Kevin Bacon FTW!

I only have two gripes with First Class. It sucks that so many good characters were wasted in those other horrible X-films (Juggernaut, Shadowcat/Kitty Pride, the original Angel, Blob, Deadpool) that First Class got stuck with some lame-o modern characters. Darwin and Lenny Kravitz' daughter (the new, weak sauce Angel) are just lame. I'm sorry, I know I stopped reading the comics before these characters were created but I really didn't give two shits about them or what their lame powers were. I'm not being a total hater on new characters though. Nightcrawler's dad Azazel was pretty rad in this movie and that was the first time I ever heard of him. My other major gripe with First Class was January Jones as The White Queen, Emma Frost. Holy feces this broad cannot act to save her life. Her performance was the most uninspired, wooden dribble I've seen in a while. I'm sure it helps that she was probably getting frisky with the director off screen, but really Vaughn, she almost killed the entire movie for me!

I prefer the animated one.

Other than that this was a pretty solid movie. Beast looked pretty rockin', Jennifer Lawrence still got nekkid as young Mystique, Banshee was cool as hell and we were treated to some grand action sequences along with, you know, character development and solid acting performances from most of the cast. Thank you Singer! We needed you.