Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
James McAvoy
Michael Fassbender
Kevin Bacon
Rose Byrne
Jennifer Lawrence
January Jones
Directed By:
Matthew Vaughn
I tried my best, not to watch this movie. On top of my acute case of superhero movie nausea, I have to admit I am not the biggest X-Men follower. I'm not the biggest comic book geek period, but the adventures of Professor X and his pupils have always been too wild and prolific for me to follow. So I procrastinated the shit out of this movie, even of Josie wanted to see it. But when he established a "popcorn film" rule for the vacation, I had no excuse not to watch X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. I did and I was pleasantly surprised. Not only I found First Class to be the best movie of the franchise yet, I thought it was the best superhero movie to date, behind the two Christopher Nolan directed Batman movies. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is the best movie I saw during my summer vacation. It's still a summer flick, but it's the only competent one we got this year.
The big catch in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is the prequel story of Erik Lehnsherr*, commonly known as Magneto. Before being the structure bending badass supervillain we all know and secretly love, he was just Erik. A little Jewish** boy who's family got caught by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz***. He has the bad luck of bending the freakin' gate of the death camp in front of mad scientist Klaus Schmidt (Kevin Motherfuckin' Bacon) and witnesses the dirtbag shooting his mother for not being able to demonstrate his talent with a coin. Childhood trauma is a popular reason for vengeance in movie, so older Erik (Michael Fassbender) embarks on a lifelong journey of kicking Nazis ass until he finds the man who murdered his mother, who happened to have changed his name for Sebastian Shaw since. I know, not the most groundbreaking storyline, but it's how the narrative is approached that made First Class stand out.
Michael Fassbender is camping Magneto with surprising skill. I didn't know he was able to camp a role where kindness, emotional damage and extreme anger cohabited so subtly. But there is a huge cast of supporting characters around him, heightening the importance of the moral choices Erik/Magneto has to make. Yes, I would even call Charles Xavier a supporting character. He's instrumental to the story, which is Magneto's quest to take vengeance on Sebastian Shaw. There is the whole Xavier storyline about how he came to build the X-Men Academy (that includes a hilarious cameo by Hugh Jackman). You're introduced to Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Havok (Lucas Till) and all the fun, first call alumni. Their destiny is pending the decisions of Erik/Magneto and the influence Charles Xavier (camped by James McAvoy) is trying to gain on him, so he can control his emotions.
McAvoy did an all right job as a young Charles Xavier. He lacked a bit of the cold old-school-father-loving-distance that Patrick Stewart had perfectly, but I blame the screenwriting. It's the character I had difficulty to swallow. I had a hard time imagining him as a hard-drinking college bro with a superior intellect. Other than this mishap, I gotta say X-MEN: FIRST CLASS makes the most out of the World War II/secret history setting. Sebastian Shaw is a well crafted occult figure and Kevin Bacon gives him the snide/snobbish edge that he needed to work. It's always fun to see how somebody reinvents explanations to the events that shaped the twentieth century, using mutants and superpowers. It's even cooler that despite having many scenes of high octane action, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS never loses trace of what it's talking about and keeps a tight frame around the Magneto/Shaw confrontation. Competent film with ambitious action scenes and a surprising performance by Michael Fassbender. Not the most emotionally gripping, but it's still a wicked good time. Even more if you have a few notions about the X-Men universe.
SCORE: 82%
Recommendation: Watch it with friends and a bag of pop-corn. Nobody is gonna bitch about the film choice
* What a shitty German name. It's like spreading Hs and ER over random letters will automatically make you German. What's wrong with Kruppke or Schroeder?
** Presumably.
*** Nazis now officially occupy the third rank of most overused movie villains after vampires and zombies.
