3 out of 5

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Enjoyable but not particularly weighty, X-Men: First Class gives enough credence to the comic book club to nudge this adaptation into the higher echelon of the recent comic-slew. It’s hard to say what makes the difference from the first X-Men to something like this. Perhaps a sense of pacing there that just isn’t evident in this film. The first few moments introduce us to childhood Magneto, his powers (and sense of justice) manifesting during WW II when his parents are killed in a concentration camp. Although Kevin Bacon’s German is a little too formal sounding (he plays Sebastien Shaw, the overall baddie in the movie), it’s nice that a high profile film allows its opening scene to be entirely subtitled. But still, there’s a hint of too much panache here, and the scene doesn’t resonate as Bryan Singer’s WW II flashback did in the first film. We get a brief intro to a young professor X and mystique… and then any possibility of a slow build is out the window, tossing in all the character setup and references we need to put our principles together. Even so, the movie remains above ground with excellent performances – I was blown away by McAvoy’s (Xavier) balance of restless youth and mature ideals. and Fassbender as Magneto doesn’t compromise from portraying the evil of the eventual villain. But First Class plays the rest of its cards so easily and so quickly – pitching the Cuban Missile Crisis as Shaw’s attempt to have the world destroyed, thus paving the way for mutantkind – that it becomes senseless, taking a potentially rich spin on history and making it into a bunch of cool looking effects. The movie hits all the expected points, with budding love interests and teenage rebellion, and thankfully ends with a sense of openness instead of trying to go for a faux-conclusion-sequel-setup feel. But it never manages to transcend the genre too far. Fun, but not as meaty as it could’ve been.