FILM REVIEW X-Men: First Class

James McAvoy stars as Charles Xavier in ‘X-Men: First Class’.

Not quite first class, but pretty good


Cinema
Daniel Carey

THERE’S a bizarre scene in Martin McDonagh’s movie ‘In Bruges’ where cocaine-fuelled dwarf Jimmy (Jordan Prentice) predicts a war between black people and white people. “This ain’t gonna be a war where you pick your side,” he explains. “Your side’s already picked for you.”
Despite being Caucasian, Ray (Colin Farrell) plans to fight with the blacks, predicting: “The whites are gonna get their heads kicked in!” Under questioning, Jimmy clarifies that the Vietnamese will be on the blacks’ side, so Ray reckons he’s definitely made the right choice.
As things turn serious, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is unclear where he’s supposed to stand amid the blood and carnage. “My wife was black,” he tells Jimmy, “and in 1976, she was murdered by a white man.” Having surveyed his companions, Ken then muses aloud: “Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf. I think I’m heading home.” That scene popped into my head during ‘X-Men: First Class’, where villain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) warns of a conflagration between humans and mutants. “There’s a revolution coming,” he tells CIA-employed ‘freaks’. “Each of us faces a choice – be enslaved or rise up to rule!”
‘X-Men: First Class’ is no ‘In Bruges’, but it’s definitely better than the 2009 outing ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’. It tells the story of how Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik AKA Magneto (Michael Fassbender) first met – quite a big deal for fans of the series.
We meet the pair first as children during the Second World War. Erik, seeing his mother taken away from him in a Polish concentration camp, bends gates with his mind. Charles is a telepathic child living comfortably in Westchester, New York, and befriends Raven, who is naturally blue-skinned but can assume the form of other people.
Fast forward to the early 1960s. Though the word ‘Jew’ is, curiously, never mentioned, Erik is a Nazi-hunter. Charles graduates from Oxford and is tracked down by CIA agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne). She needs his help to fight Bacon’s evil Shaw, who killed Erik’s mother and is now attempting to orchestrate a nuclear catastrophe. His master-plan –‘get the Yanks and Ruskies to blow each other up’ – may seem a little familiar.



Using a machine not unlike that deployed by Jim Carrey’s Riddler in ‘Batman Forever’, Charles locates fellow mutants for the battle with Shaw. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine shows up with a brief, foul-mouthed cameo that got a big laugh from the audience. Under the direction of Fox Mulder-type Oliver Platt, they break into the Russian defence minister’s house to confront Shaw’s right hand woman Emma Frost (January Jones), another powerful mind-reader.
What follows is a secret history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was (apparently) the brainchild of one megalomaniac (and we don’t mean Fidel Castro). The good mutants retreat to England to get ready for a battle to the death. The characters are well drawn, the acting solid, and the special effects decent.
Mind you, Charles’s self-esteem coaching gets tiresome – “True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity” is not a made-up quote. Jibes like like “I didn’t know the circus was in town” seem passé in the age of Lady Gaga. “Have you ever looked at a tiger and thought you should cover it up” may be the worst chat-up line ever uttered on screen.
The closing stages – set on the high seas – are rather disappointing, though not quite as mad as the finish of ‘Wolverine’. For all its faults, however, ‘X-Men: First Class’ represents a return to form for the franchise.

Rating 6 out of 10