One can't help feeling that the X-Men movies have enjoyed a rather charmed life. Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, which opens in the UK on Wednesday, will be the fifth film about Professor X and his merry band of mutants to hit the big screen in only 11 years. That's as many as Superman, two more than Spider-Man and only one fewer than Batman. Critical drubbings for various instalments in those other "franchises" have led to drastic regime changes at the top, often coupled with years of soul searching over which direction to go in next. Yet Twentieth Century Fox cheerfully goes about its business of making sure a new film arrives in multiplexes every couple of years, even after non-starters such as 2006's Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Final Stand and 2009's insipid Wolverine.
X-Men: First ClassProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 131 minsDirectors: Matthew VaughnCast: James McAvoy, January Jones, Jason Flemyng, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Rose ByrneMore on this filmX-Men: First Class may be a prequel set in a new era (the early 60s) with a new cast, but it is not nearly as much of a genuine mutation from the norm as might be expected. Nor is it quite as good as some early reviews have suggested.
Whereas Christopher Nolan breezily ignored all the previous Batman films with his genre-defining Batman Begins, Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman's script is based on a story by Bryan Singer, who made the first two X-Men movies. The film ends up being not so much a radical reinvention of the series as an affirmation of those earlier features: it has their DNA running through its system, and we're left in no doubt that events are intended to prefigure those we've already seen pan out on screen.
Had X-Men: First Class arrived back in 2000, when Singer's first film hit cinemas, it might have been revolutionary. Arriving as it does in 2011, it feels like a throwback to an earlier, simpler era where audiences were willing to accept cardboard cut-out villains and one-dimensional heroes. It's the sort of film for which the caveat "it's only a comic book movie" will be constantly offered in conversation.
There are nonetheless some excellent aspects. Vaughn convincingly introduces us to the young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), and shows us why the two might just as easily have been friends as enemies. Lehnsherr (the future Magneto) has a cracking stony-faced early escapade to Argentina to track down some retired Nazis, coming off like James Bond with superpowers (and a mean, lean, Daniel Craig-style 007 at that). McAvoy is typically lovable as the cocky yet earnest Xavier, the sort of geeky posh bloke who might have ended up as a charismatic, well-meaning charity boss had he not been gifted with mutant genes. Of the remaining cast, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones and Rose Byrne all do well to flesh out meagre material, though the film rather limits their involvement to that of classy eye candy.
Kevin Bacon makes a suitably sinister villain, but it's here that the film begins to reveal its limited ambition. The 60s setting almost compels the film-makers to pay homage to Bond et al, but the villains in X-Men: First Class are like bad guys in cheap James Bond movies. They want to take over the world because they want to take over the world. There are efforts to explain their hatred of humans, but they are the same arguments used in the earlier films, and there's very little complexity to them.
I forget whether the line: "Mutant and proud" appears in the original films or comic books, but its use here by Lawrence's Mystique feels contrived and unnecessary. So, too, the scene in which Fassbender, addressed by his given name, utters: "I prefer Magneto." At these moments, it's impossible not to shudder at the cargo load of obscenely stinky, sweaty cheese that has just been driven right through the centre of the movie. Did some suit at Fox insist on these lines being used, or did Singer, Vaughn and Goldman genuinely think they were a good idea?
I've often berated studios such as Warner Bros on this blog for umming and ahhing over what to do with Superman in the wake of Singer's prosaic Superman Returns in 2006, but the opposite end of the spectrum is Fox's attitude that you don't mess with a good (or even a bad) thing. Had the money men who oversee X-Men been in charge of Batman, George Clooney would still be sporting rubber batnipples and Joel Schumacher would be planning his fifth or sixth instalment. Hence, X-Men: First Class is not so much a reboot as a gentle reroute.
For this series to reach the heights of great comic book movies, it requires a real DNA change. No more Singer, and no more idiotic one-liners, please. It's time for a genuine mutation.
