2 out of 5

Directed by: Bryan Singer

From the get-go, ‘Future Past’ feels troubled: a rushed voice-over vague explanation of how the future sucks unsmoothly transition to some of the most abrupt and unmatching titles I’ve seen in recent past, which equally unsmoothly transition to a harried fight sequence (the film’s attempt to throttle us with fannish glee) that features winks all up and down the X-Men lineage.  It’s not unexciting, just fairly bland – as, I would like to say, a lot of the larger scale action sequences felt in the first two X-Men films – though Singer does take joy in Blink’s teleportation skills, reveling in slow-mo as she flits around.  It’s a nifty power and executed well on screen, and keeps the adrenaline going when flashes of Colossus and Sunspot and a rather young seeming Warpath don’t add more than a smile to the sequence.  The scene ends and we then get our first dose of sludgy exposition: Kitty Pride catches Xavier and crew up on some time-hopping they’ve been doing to avoid the ultra-powerful sentinels, which have cleaned mutants’ clocks in these Future Days.  The decision is quickly made to go back in time and prevent the incident that would kick off the Sentinels’ production: Mystique’s killing of Bolivar Trask.  And because he’s our favorite, Wolverine gets to mind-jump to his hip 70s self.  The approximate first half of the film is Wolvie gathering his 70s mates and convincing them (preeeetty easily) of the whole future shtick, and the second half essentially deals with the fallout of how Xavier and Magneto respond to this news in their owns ways.  And… it’s fairly boring.  The film can neither satisfy as a “political thriller,” as that theme was mined a bit more in First Class, nor can it play its hand too easily as a slug-fest because the whole point is to avoid fisticuffs for the sake of mutanity.  Thus the script bides its time with trying to reconcile matters between X and M, feeling much like a re-hash of the same conversations that have taken place in all previous films.  Thankfully, we have an actual director at the helm (cough cough not Ratner), capable of swinging between both some impressively patient and composed humorous sequences, like Quicksilver’s shining moment, as well as adding some interesting heft to roundtable discussions with Trask so that these do seem like characters and not just talking heads.  Unfortunately, the way the script is structured, we can’t really play around with fun time travel too much – Wolvie must remain sedated in the future, so we’re stuck in the past – and trying to cobble together the leftovers from First Class sets us too far away from where the plot needs to be to avoid all of the excess exposition while trying to maintain a reasonable runtime.  What this means, though I feel bad saying it, is that the film has elements of Last Stand’s ADD setup, while at the same time setting up its pieces a bit too slowly to build much momentum.  It’s underwhelming.  However, when it does come together – which, pleasingly, it does during the film’s coda – it’s incredibly fun, and gives hope that the next film, which can perhaps stand more on its own, will be more in line with the grace Singer brought to the original.