Unsolicited X-Men: First Class Review

Staring down the barrel of a potential franchise.

X-Men: First Class
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbinder, Kevin Bacon, J. Jones
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
2011

A fifth X-Men film was a dicey move considering the reception the last two entries received. I know people who are still foaming over X-Men 3, and I know even more people who like to pretend Wolverine was all a dream. Yet here we are, a mere two years after Wolverine’s stiff corpse limped out of theaters, with another movie based around Marvel’s freaky-powered mutant posse. This time, they’ve turned the clock back to 1963 to show us how the X-Men first got their shiz together. Surprisingly, it works, injecting the series with a youth, vigor, and simplicity that’ll appeal to anyone still haunted by the ghost of mutant movies past.

There’s a little retread in the beginning as First Class recounts the Nazi-riddled youth of Erik Lensherr, a.k.a. Magneto (Fassbinder). Trapped in a concentration camp, the poor kid was subject to all sorts of horrors, worst of all being the heartless murder of his mother in the office of some high-ranking sauerkraut jockey. Expectedly, Erik escapes the clutches of his evil captors and grows up to become the world’s most lethal Nazi hunter. This leads him to cross paths with Professor Charles Xavier (McAvoy), a fellow mutant who’s helping the U.S. government sniff out a Soviet missile kerfuffle. Charles convinces Erik to join him heading up a fledgling mutant wing of the C.I.A., and before long they’re futzing around with shrimpy, angsty versions of Banshee and Beast.

Of course it turns out the reclusive billionaire at the heart of the Soviet missile thing, one Sebastian Shaw (Bacon), is the very same high-ranking Nazi who murdered Erik’s mother right in front of him all those years ago. This Shaw fella is one multi-faceted bad guy. Not only is he former Nazi with enough money and power to insert himself into America’s foreign affairs, he’s also an aging-in-reverse mutant who can absorb any kind of energy and throw it right back in your stupid monkey face. On top of that, he’s got a sexy mind-reading liege (Jones) at his beck and call. Oh, and if you think you’re just gonna waltz in there with your own mind-reading mutant to ruin Shaw’s day, forget it. The guy’s got some kinda helmet he wears to prevent that.

In the face of incredible adversity plus some dissension amongst their ranks, the X-Men pull together in the end to give Sebastian Shaw what for. By that point, you’ll forgive First Class for killing off its only black mutant mere minutes after his introduction and for letting its younger mutants dress like walking Axe body spray ads instead of actual residents of 1963. This is summer popcorn fun that, despite its more dubious moments, isn’t entirely without soul or brains, a movie that leverages scantily-clad eye candy like January Jones with believable emotional back-and-forths between its two steely male leads.

There are also some really fun cameos in X-Men: First Class that the nerd world has inexplicably kept quiet until this point. The Pibb Xtra will come out yo’ nose when you see ’em, no lie. Stan Lee wishes his Spider-Man and Hulk walk-ons elicited such rousing audience responses.

FINAL SCORE: Three and a half ice-cold January Joneses (out of four).