“X-Men First Class” best comicbook flick since “Dark Knight”

I’m waiting like crazy for July’s Captain America, The First Avenger.

Thor clocked in at just about exactly what I thought it would be. As you may recall, I considered it kick-ass fun without kicking much actual ass. It hit all its compulsories, helped set up next summer’s  Avengers franchise launch, but failed to add anything vital to the genre. It didn’t so much stick the dismount as it hopped gracefully off the bar and had its assistant hand it a cappucino.

Can’t wait to take The Boy to see his first comic book epic on the big screen, Green Lantern, in a couple weeks. The trailers make it look like loud, fast, dumb fun, with comic-booky violence so removed from reality it shouldn’t needlessly traumatize the lad. He’s looking forward to that one like I’m looking forward to Captain America.

It’s a great summer for comic book films and next summer should be even bigger, with the last film in Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers being the ones I know of off-hand. I’m sure there are some that are flying beneath the radar, too...

Like X-Men First Class. I’ve always liked the X-Men movies without loving them. There was always a shiny sheen, a remove that kept me from caring too much about the actual characters. They were top-notch productions and one had a cool, WWII backstory, and Ian McKellan was awfully good as Magneto… but I always thought Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier was a crap character. I love the actor, but somehow never even cared about his character in the X-Men movies.

It was a series ready for a reboot, and director Matthew Vaughn picks up the challenge and runs with it. He has really improved his game since Kick Ass, which I also enjoyed. In what I consider a brilliant move, he did not ret-con* the comic book continuity to place the story in the present day—as is the usual custom—but instead retconned history to accommodate his superhero yarn. The result in this case is to lend the proceedings considerably more heft than the standard comic book movie formula.

This is the best superhero movie since Dark Knight, hands down.

Initially set briefly in the last days of WWII, it features Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr as children, juxtaposing Xavier’s blueblood upbringing stateside with young Lensherr’s nightmarish concentration camp boyhood. As might be expected, the two backgrounds produce young men a few scenes later of starkly different outlooks concerning the paranormal abilities they have discovered they wield. Xavier is a privileged idealist who wants to unite mutants and mankind in peaceful coexistence, whereas Lensherr’s experiences in the camps have caused him to have given up on humanity altogether, and decide the only safe thing to do for mutantkind—his kind—is rule the world himself.

There is also a proper bad guy, an energy-absorber played by Kevin Bacon, who sets about screwing around with the Cuban Missile Crisis and all those lovely energy-filled nukes. His powered-up minions include January Jones as a mind-reading ice-maiden (of sorts) in a bikini; a red, teleporty Nightcrawler-looking scalawag; and a third evil mutant who apparently creates tornadoes with his hands.

It sounds like there should be too much going on, but the movie is constructed just about perfectly. And the actors playing the twenty-something mutant leaders—James McAvoy as telepath Xavier and Michael Fassbender as metal-master Lensherr—are terrific. Both are vaguely familiar, but not in any way I can put my finger on; they’re perfect as people who are supposed to grow up to be actors with whom I am already very familiar. And the actors themselves are both more than solid. They made me care. Maybe part of it is they had more screen time in this film, but I’d wager both young actors are movie stars in the making.

The gal playing Raven the shapeshifter, Jennifer Lawrence, just couldn’t be hotter in a voluptuous, Marilyn Monroe kind of way, either. The fact that she spends much of the movie in blue body paint and little or nothing else may add something to her allure, and screen time.

Familiar character actors ably fill in the necessary military commander roles, and the movie boasts a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em cameos that are sure to have fans’ tongues wagging (but not mine!).

In the end, though, this film is a buddies-gone-wrong picture about Professor X and Magneto, and as such, succeeds marvelously. As an astute tweaking of American/Soviet history, it also must receive points. And purely as an exercise in big-screen superheroics, it wreaks maximum mayhem, with only a couple of cheesey-looking effects shots to detract from the overall impact and hint at what was probably a relatively miserly budget. (And perhaps a re-shot ending?)

It was written smarter than the average four-color fare, so I hope it has enough whiz-bang moments to keep the kids coming back for the bean-counters to justify another film by the same creative team. They certainly laid enough Easter Eggs for fans to suggest the direction a second story might take.

On the ride home after the movie, I was already looking forward to buying the DVD of this thing when it comes out. I’m not sure why or how it flew so well for so long under the radar, but it was a damned happy surprise.

Recommended!

* ret-con: a comic book term, short for retroactive-continuity, where an old character’s origin is taken out, tarted-up and re-vamped for the current generation of fans.