Movie review: ‘X-Men: First Class’ puts Marvel franchise back on track
After growing a bit shopworn and predictable in recent big-screen outings, a lucrative Marvel Comics franchise gets a smart, energetic reboot in “X-Men: First Class,” which scores far more strongly as an origin story than did the disappointing 2009 prequel “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
Technically the fifth in the film series drawn from writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby’s graphic superhero sagas, “First Class” essentially returns to the X-Men roots with a tale about Professor X establishing his team of powerful “mutants” and finding his philosophical foil in one with a dark, Nazi-tinged past.
Hip British director Matthew Vaughn (of the smart-alecky “Kick Ass”) is a clever choice to helm this revitalization project, and he opens with a shadowy World War II prologue in which child refugee Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner) suffers at the hands of a Mengele-like Nazi doctor (silky and sinister Kevin Bacon) who attempts to tap the boy’s amazing powers with torturous efficiency.
Leap ahead to the swinging ’60s – to the tune of Booker T. & the M.G.’s “Green Onions” – where the adult Lehnsherr (a tightly coiled Michael Fassbender) is on a rage-driven quest, employing his powers to bend, twist and propel metal, to hunt down and kill his Nazi tormentors. This jaunty but violent sequence invests the film with a retro-cool, Dr. Strangelove/007 vibe.
Soon enough, Lehnsherr comes to the attention of Charles Francis Xavier (James McAvoy, oozing playboy charm), a brilliant Ivy League academic with the power to read and manipulate human minds. He’s been recruited by perky CIA agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne of TV’s “Damages”) to assemble a team of mutants and stop arch-villain Sebastian Shaw (Bacon’s Nazi doc morphed into a Lex Luthor-style megalomaniac), who, with the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, is intent on triggering a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
Much time is spent on Xavier’s assembling and training of his mutant team, which robs the story of some momentum. And, truly, there are too many characters here for one film to deal with effectively.
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