X-Men: First Class (2011)

Dir.: Matthew Vaughan

Plot: A young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr must organise their mutant brethren to stop a mutant supremacist bent on causing nuclear war.

The year is 1962, people; and in case you forget, here’s a bunch of mobsters and playboy bunnies listening to rock and roll. Holocaust survivor Erik Lehnsherr is on a quest to track down the man responsible for his mother’s death, a sinister mutant supremacist using the name Sebastian Shaw. Meanwhile, promising scientist Charles Xavier is at Oxford (as a current student, background glimpses of the Sheldonian and Rad Cam generated much involuntary squealing on my part) preparing his thesis on, you guessed it, mutation. He is approached by Moira MacTaggert, a CIA agent who has witnessed Shaw’s shenanigans first hand and begs Xavier to help stop Shaw from provoking a nuclear war between Russia and the US. With Xavier and Lehnsherr’s paths now fully intertwined, the two set about training a group of young mutants to avert global disaster.

After a few uncomfortably clunky scenes early on, the film really gets going once the set up is out of the way, tightening into a briskly-paced actioner with some nice nods to the comic mythology and to the previous films - one brief cameo will have any fanboy/girl melting into their chair with glee. McAvoy and Fassbender are fantastic in the leads, particularly McAvoy’s refreshingly cheeky characterisation of Charles Xavier, although we really needed more screentime to buy the deep friendship they are supposed to have. The filmmakers have admirably tried to avoid the common pitfall of shovelling in too many plotlines and not really fully exploring any of them, and the story is pleasingly linear. However, the downside of this is that they try to take their chosen arc, namely the friendship and subsequent split of Xavier and Magneto, neatly from start to finish over the course of one movie, and that really can't do it justice. 

Needed more of this

In fact, there is a distinct lack of emotional clout in X-Men: First Class when compared with the intensity of X2. The allegories which were so finely drawn in X2 are left forgotten for a long stretches here and then shoved in your face as though suddenly remembered. Much of this comes from the young supporting cast, who can't hope to match presence and emotional weight that Jackman, Berry, Jansen, Cumming etc. brought to their roles in the original movies. That said, Fassbender and McAvoy wring as much as possible out of what they get, and it produces some very nice moments between them, chief of which is Erik letting Xavier into his mind and getting me a little choked up in the process. The two work fantastically together, Fassbender bearing much of the weight as the traumatised and embittered Lehnsherr, whilst McAvoy gets to be very witty and charming as Charles Xavier. When tragedy strikes Xavier in the film's climactic scene, the effect is thus very powerful indeed, one of the only moments which merits a place as one of the franchise's iconic moments.

The Swingin’ 60s vibe is used with welcome self-restraint (Fassbender knows how to wear a turtleneck), with the exception of Shaw’s groovy villain submarine, rather too reminiscent of Austin Powers for my liking:

Emmanuelle Goes To The Underwater Lair Of A Genocidal Maniac didn't have the same ring...

Kevin Bacon is clearly loving the role, though, hamming it up like nobody’s business, and making Xavier’s bunch of earnest youngbloods look a little dull in comparison. Of these, the only standout is Nicholas Hoult doing a fabulous impression of Phoebe’s boyfriend David in Friends; but he gets slightly frittered away in a banal plot strand about accepting who you are, yadda yadda.

At one point, Erik Lehnsherr, soon to become infamous as Magneto, tells an anguished Mystique: ‘You want society to accept you, but you can't even accept yourself.’. And if you miss that line, don’t worry, because there are about ten more practically identical scenes. Apparently paranoid that we might not get the message, the movie hammers the ‘Be yourself’ mantra into your head until your ears start to ring. So, subtlety may not really be X-Men: First Class’ strong suit, but be assured that its combination of pace, energy and two devastatingly assured lead performances make it one of the better summer blockbusters of the past few years.

7/10