X-Men the First Class-review

Seig heil!

            Another X-Men movie seemed like such a bad idea.  The third one was pretty mediocre and the Wolverine movie was all sorts of rotten.  This one however is actually on par with the first one. Now we don’t have all the wasted time of exposition of what a mutant is we can get into the meat of the story and they actually give us a really fun ride through the Cuban Missile Crisis.

            It begins with Erik Lehnsherr as a boy from the first movie as his mother and father are being marched into the Nazi death camps.  We see the same footage with a few new frames spliced in of Kevin Bacon who is the new villain Sebastian Shaw.  Now for those of you who actually read the comics you know that Sebastian Shaw isn’t a Nazi scientist.  But the movie continuity and comic continuity never really came together anyway.

The champagne room sure is strange in this town.

            Frankly, I would have loved to have seen Erik in an entire movie of him doing what he was doing for a good portion of the film. He hunts Nazis with his powers in the movie.  It’s so badass to watch the guy beat the shit out of a guy then put out his fillings because that is what they did.  It’s sick and it’s twisted, but it’s also believable why a person would do that with the awesome powers that they have.   Meanwhile James McAvoy is Austin Powers-ing the hell out of his role as Professor Xavier.  That is, when we first meet him.

Betty Drapper brings home the Bacon. HA!

            He has a great relationship with Mystique and we and the development of the first X-Men team.  Beast looks amazing and all the characters are likeable and do their part well.  They have come a long way with effects.  I liked January Jones as Emma Frost.  First off, DAMN she looks amazing in her outfits that are almost straight out of the comics and damn near what a fembot would wear.  Second it’s actually fun to see her as this heartless, cold, bitch of a character instead of a frail housewife that is used to a life of getting trampled on by her husband in “Mad Men”.

When you can shapeshift are the outfits really needed?

            As far as nit picking goes the one thing that got me a bit was that at the end Xavier is crippled.  Now this movie is attempting very hard to keep up with the canon of the rest of series and considering Patrick Stewart was walking in the beginning of the third X-Men movie that is a wee bit of a continuity error.  Of course this really doesn’t matter in the long run.  In the Wolverine movie there is an Emma Frost character that is clearly a much younger girl.  So really who gives a shit?  It’s not exactly “Lord of the Rings”. 

            Really it’s a fun super hero movie that has a fun sixties backdrop.  The characters work marvelously with one another and you grow to care about all of them as they are incredibly well developed for a change.  Also there are some great cameos by Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn which show some class coming back for a laugh.  All in all it’s totally worth seeing.