X Men : First Class
Review
by Anthony Morris
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X Men : First Class
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It's prequel time once again in Hollywood, and after pretty much
flushing the X-Men franchise down the toilet with the dubious third
instalment (Wolverine's solo outing didn’t exactly impress either), it's time to step back into the past.
This time around we look at the lives
of Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) in the
hope that setting things in the swinging 60s will make everyone forget
just how badly things went wrong.
The good news is, for the most part it works.
After
a few brief scenes set in 1944 where Xavier / Professor X and Erik /
Magneto are revealed to have had very different childhoods, it’s off to
1962.
Xavier and his adopted sister Mystique (Jennifer
Lawrence) are hanging around Oxford (in Xavier’s case, using his mind
powers to hit on the ladies) while Erik is a full-time Nazi hunter, and
when a sinister figure from his past (Kevin Bacon) comes to the
attention of CIA agent Moria McTaggert (Rose Byrne) she ends up
knocking on Xavier’s door for his expertise in the so-far unknown world
of “mutants”.
In some ways this film’s biggest success is that
director Michael Vaughn (Kick-Ass) keeps such a sprawling story and
massive cast (the good and bad guys have their own squad of mutants)
under control; in other ways its biggest success is in making all this
a lot of fun.
The bad guys are operating firmly from the James
Bond villain handbook, Xavier says "groovy" more than once, the whole
Mad Men look works well and there's a bunch of fun cameos to watch out
for inbetween some pretty solid action scenes.
The X-Men movies have one big advantage over pretty much every other superhero franchise: they’re actually about something.
No-one’s
going to suggest that their treatment of prejudice and discrimination
is all that insightful – it’s discrimination against mostly
good-looking people with super-powers – but it does give this a
little more weight than films like Thor and Iron Man (which this is at least as good as).
It
does end up biting off a little more than it can comfortably handle
towards the end but it hardly falls apart, and rock-solid performances
from both McAvoy and Fassbender as the only two characters we really
care about is more than enough to make this the most impressive X-Men
movie to date. 4 out
of 5
X Men : First Class
Australian release: 2nd June,
2011
Official
Site: X Men : First Class
Cast: Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Caleb Landry Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Kevin Bacon
Director: Matthew Vaughn
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