Review: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is a good film. Its performances range from solid to excellent, its action scenes are often spectacular and its involving plot culminates in a genuinely thrilling finale. The film is a massive improvement over both its fuckwitted predecessor The Last Stand and 2009's nonsensical mope-fest X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

So why, on leaving the cinema, was my overriding impression one of niggling disappointment? As exciting and engrossing as First Class often is, it is also flawed along its length and breadth, like a spectacular country mansion overrun by dry rot. Or indeed like a big budget blockbuster movie that swapped directors little over a year before its release and only started filming nine months before its premiere.

The film gives the X-Men franchise a Men In Black-style memory wipe, erasing the sweaty nightmare of The Last Stand by turning the clock back to the 60s origin of the mutant team. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has just completed his thesis at Oxford University (accompanied by a young Mystique, who has been his unofficial ward since childhood) when he's contacted by the CIA who are looking into the existence of genetic mutants with extraordinary powers.

Meanwhile, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is a very angry young man. Cruelly tampered with by Nazi scientists in a World War II death camp, Lensherr endured the murder of his parents and is now huffing around the globe searching for Nazi war criminals with the help of his power over metal and a head full of unresolved rage issues. His primary target is his chief childhood tormentor Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who has become the head of the Hellfire Club, a secret (if ostentatiously named) society dedicated to securing global domination for mutantkind as the world's rightful homo superior.

This set-up leads to the fateful meeting and friendship between Lensherr and Xavier as they search for others of their kind and partner up to thwart Shaw's scheme to exploit Cold War tensions and bring about a nuclear apocalypse from which mutants will emerge as mankind's new rulers (somehow).

First Class's chief accomplishment is in establishing and exploring the early relationship between the young Erik and Charles. As Xavier, McAvoy practically purrs with easygoing charm and the hint of arrogance that probably comes with the territory when you're a handsome mind-reader with a genius intellect and the backing of the CIA by your mid 20s. Fassbender is on another level though (despite the much-discussed "wandering accent"), imbuing our proto-Magneto with an inner furnace of rage that drives him to team up with the nascent X-Men while pushing him ever further down his own dark path. Early scenes depicting Erik torturing Swiss bankers and tracking down exiled Nazi war criminals like a deranged Jason Bourne are shot for maximum impact, and effectively give insight into the overt violence and deeply buried nobility behind his goals. This Erik is a master of magnetism in more ways than one.

His friendship with Charles allows us a glimpse at the man Magneto could have been, as Erik's darkness is softened by emotional vulnerability and the wolfish grin that Fassbender is so rarely called upon to show us. The dynamics between the two men provide the film's emotional momentum, and any future installments of this new X-Men timeline should lean heavily on this new chemistry that McAvoy and Fassbender have created.

The direction of Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) also provides some highlights. First Class is liberally sprinkled with energetic and well-captured sequences. Erik and Charles's search for new teammates (with a prototype of mutant compass Cerebro developed by a young Henry McCoy, the mutant scientist who will become Beast) nails the pair's excitement at discovering that, far from being alone, they're part of a community.

Similarly, a montage showing Xavier's new team - including McCoy, chest-beam jock Havok, sonic screamer Banshee and a radical but effective reinterpretation of Angel - preparing for their confrontation with Shaw exhibits a freewheeling sense of fun, as well as exploring the notion that Xavier teaches his young students to control their powers by giving them respect instead of the cocktail of fear and anger to which Erik was subjected. The climactic showdown, pitting Erik and Charles's team against Shaw, malevolent psychic Emma Frost, devilish teleporter (and father of Nightcrawler) Azazel and tornado-maker Riptide is a stunning finale. Set in the seas around Cuba with US and Russian armadas ready to initiate nuclear war, this final set-piece sees all the mutants unleash the fury in a variety of bracing and imaginative ways. As an action scene, it's easily the equal of anything we've seen in X-Men movies before.

So with the movie hitting the right note on so many occasions, why the disappointment? Unfortunately, much of the great work done here is undermined by some persistent flaws. The film's effects are excellent in places but elsewhere seem to suffer for its rushed post-production schedule. The biggest victim is poor old Beast. Nicholas Hoult plays Hank McCoy well, expressing his intelligence and deep-set insecurities, but the money shot after his accidental transformation into his feral form is painfully botched.

The idea behind Beast's design is conceptually solid in its attempt to bring out the wildness of his look - as opposed to The Last Stand's "fat blue Elvis" concept - but the execution is almost comedically poor. The promo images looked reasonable but in motion, sadly, Beast looks more X-Muppet than X-Man. Elsewhere, dodgy greenscreen work and other examples of poor costume and make-up design (Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique looks positively uncomfortable and unnatural in her blue skin, possibly explaining why it was shown so little) too often rip the audience out of the story.

More importantly, the frantic pace of the story and the overriding dominance of the Xavier-Lensherr relationship stymies almost any other character development. Mystique gets some attention by virtue of being pulled into the orbit of Erik's descent into villainy, but most of the other mutant players are so emotionally malnourished that they effectively become delivery mechanisms for their powers. This makes a number of character beats pretty inexplicable. A prominent betrayal in the plot makes barely a lick of sense, and Charles's "romance" with CIA agent Moira McTaggert is so underwritten that one would assume they were workmanlike colleagues until they randomly suck on each other's faces near the end (wheelchair fetish, perhaps?). These character missteps should serve as a stark warning to Joss Whedon and the Avengers team on the delicate balancing act that goes into creating a whole team of fully fleshed characters.

X-Men: First Class is a film that gets so much right. The disappointment stems not from what the film is, but what it could have been. With a few more months added to the schedule, the prodigious talent in front of and behind the camera might well have produced the finest Marvel Universe movie to date. Instead, we're left with a film that's often brilliant but fails to coalesce as a satisfying whole.

Statisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 6/10