X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed at Metropolitan Camino Real Theatre, Goleta.

This is all getting rather confusing now.  The remake machine has become the reboot machine.  Unlike some of the other superhero reboots around (The Incredible Hulk, next year’s Spider-Man), X-Men: First Class doesn’t seem to want to throw the box-office-smash-baby out with the bathwater.  So, with an (almost) entirely new cast, we go down memory lane and see where, or rather when, it all began.

Back in the 1960s, Charles (soon to be Professor X) Xavier ( James McAvoy) is an unreasonably wealthy, sexually liberated genetics student, and Eric (not yet Magneto) Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is an internment camp survivor and one-man Nazi hunting machine.  Though from widely disparate backgrounds, the two young mutants form a fast, if uneasy, friendship.  They take a group of children under their wings, trying to educate and protect them from a far older super-powered individual, an opportunist named Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who thrives in conflict and is currently seeking to push the US and USSR into starting World War Three.

This is yet another super-hero origin story, but unlike most of the other Marvel and DC adaptations, this one has to cram more than half a dozen starts into its 132 minute running time.  This leaves the first act of the film feeling pretty crowded and often without  Magneto involved, and that’s a problem.  The film really belongs to him.  Unlike McAvoy, who while not going ‘full McGregor’ (as all attempts by a young actor to mimic the performance of an older, established character must be known post Star Wars Episode 1), does seem constrained by the studied calm of Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Fassbender abandons any attempt to impersonate or mimic Ian McKellen’s Magneto.  He makes no attempt to disguise his natural accent, nor to reign in the angry-young-man persona that fits the younger Lensherr so well.  Others have derided Fassbender’s performance as too distant from McKellen’s, but they have missed the point.  Fassbender makes the role his own, and the film is better for it.  He is, though I fear to pun so crassly, magnetic.

The supporting actors  are a bit of a mixed bunch.  The younger mutants acquit themselves pretty well, but January Jones, playing telepath Emma Frost, seems to have taken the valium addled 50s housewife role from TV’s Mad Men to heart.  Her Frost is so inert, it feels as though she’s downed a handful of ‘mommy’s little helpers’ along the way.

Given its 60s setting, the film has to tread a fine line between historical relevancy and Austin Powers kitsch.  It manages this for the most part, although when a CIA agent strips to her stockings-and-suspenders underwear, which she apparently always wears on stake-outs, so that she can sneak into an exclusive member’s club, the film slips firmly into misogynistic camp.  It’s an unfortunate scene in a film where the mutant characters strive to be accepted for who they are regardless of how they look.  It’s not who you are, not how brilliant an agent nor how beautiful your personality beneath your scaly blue exterior, but how conventionally hot you look in your improbable undies that counts.

The story, once it gets past the lumbering first act, cracks along at a reasonable, if not head-spinning, pace, and doesn’t sag too badly under its fairly long running time.  There are a few gags for the original’s fans in here (along with a cameo or two), but the material is explained well enough for anyone who hasn’t seen the first four films to get the gist.  Overall, it’s not a bad attempt to breathe life back into a franchise which had been hamstrung by its two recent, lackluster additions.  For director Vaughn it’s certainly a step up from the inconsistent and overrated Kick-Ass.  Following on from the reasonable, though more flawed, Thor, the summer’s supero-hero fest is off to a pretty good start.

 

About this entry

You’re currently reading “X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011): USA,” an entry on Student Film Reviews

Published:
06.05.11 / 9pm
Category:
Films