REVIEW: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class (2011): Dir. Matthew Vaughn. Written by: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Story by: Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer. Based on characters created by: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Chris Claremont. Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of action and violence, some sexual content including brief partial nudity and language). Running time: 132 minutes.

1 ½ stars (out of four)

X-Men: First Class commits the cardinal sin of movie prequels. The film is all exposition, belaboring how the characters in previous films got to be who they are and why they believe what they believe. There are answers to questions I never particularly cared about – So that’s how Professor Xavier became paralyzed! – while others remain frustratingly unclear. The X-Men mythology has always suggested a great depth of storytelling possibilities but First Class is instead a by-the-numbers superhero flick, flat and forgettable.

As is typical for an X-Men film, First Class is crowded with storylines, some more satisfying than others. We meet Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner as the young Erik, and Michael Fassbender as the all grown-up version) in a concentration camp in 1944. Lehnsherr is a young boy when a German named Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) takes particular interest in his strange powers and separates him from his family. Shaw tortures the boy with cruel experiments that, years later, fuel an older Lehnsherr’s quest for revenge. We see how Lehnsherr’s tortured past leads him to become the nefarious Magneto and we are reminded of the old Yoda maxim about how hatred leads to suffering.

We jump ahead to 1962, where a college-aged Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is charming young women at the pub. There, a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) offers him a proposition. She has reason to believe some particularly nasty mutants led by none other than Sebastian Shaw may be behind a nuclear threat in Cuba and she enlists Xavier’s help. Xavier, in turn, begins recruiting some young mutants to join his team.

Between First Class’s dual protagonists and the several asides and tangents the film takes with its secondary characters, there is more than enough to fill one movie. Erik’s Nazi-revenge narrative offers some of the more entertaining scenes, capturing some of the gleeful violence that Tarantino tapped into for his Inglourious Basterds (which also featured Fassbender). Here, Fassbender is exceptional as the young Magneto. He sketches out his own dark and brooding take on the character while keeping in mind how the immortal Ian McKellen made Magneto the kind of villain we secretly root for. As the Nazi-turned-Soviet Shaw, Kevin Bacon is appropriately cartoonish, though he plays the role a few shades below Gary Oldman territory (the gold standard for over-the-top villainy).

Xavier’s storyline is less satisfying because it is bogged down in exposition that lays the groundwork for what we already know. As the wise mentor to the young mutants, McAvoy has clearly studied Patrick Stewart’s eloquent diction and knowing smile. Unfortunately, the script restricts him to establishing Stewart’s take on Xavier and unlike Fassbender, McAvoy does not have sufficient room to stretch out and make the role his own.

The alternate history is a letdown too. I usually enjoy this sort of history-twisting but First Class does not make the most of its Cuban Mutant Crisis, which neglects to explore the implications of its fictionalized version of the famous event. This is largely the fault of a dramatically clumsy script that often inserts scenes for mechanical plot purposes without adequately setting them up.

I must admit that I am not an expert on X-Men mythology, though I have always been intrigued by it. The second X-Men film, X2: X-Men United, does a wonderful job of exploring the X-Men universe, revealing the many fascinating ways in which mutants interact with humankind. After watching snippets of that film on TV again recently (the channel FX has been playing the earlier films ad nauseam in preparation for First Class), I was excited to see the new film, which I hoped would continue to flesh out the complex history of human/mutant relations.

Such subtleties are not to be found here. Aside from our two leads, each mutant is reduced to their respective power, dutifully performing their supernatural feats when the action demands they do so. Occasionally, they take on traits that roughly resemble character but only when convenient for the plot.

Am I alone in wanting to learn more about the world of X-Men? Why, for example, are some of the mutants’ powers extraordinary while others are little more than party tricks? How can so many different powers be unified as a single genetic trend?

There is another problem with X-Men: First Class that is indicative of a larger trend in today’s blockbusters. All of the important characters are without exception white men. Around the movie’s midpoint, however, a black mutant named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) is introduced. When another character describes how humans mistreat mutants, the camera cuts to Darwin on the word “enslavement,” as if his only purpose in the film is to underscore the parallels between the plight of mutants and real-life historical prejudices. He gets only two brief scenes prior to this and as the token black character in the movie, his fate can be guessed.

Then there is a very strange sexist joke late in the film involving Rose Byrne’s CIA agent. The line, which is laugh-out-loud funny if only because of its jarring placement in the film, reminds us how one-dimensional the women in First Class are. One of the mutants, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), has potential to be a fully developed character but the film spends more time emphasizing the physical developments of her scaly, blue body as she vies for the desires of up to three different men.

In today’s age, these glaring choices cannot be dismissed as incidental, and for such blatant discriminatory casting and writing I deducted a half star from my rating. Director Matthew Vaughn and his writers (listed above) should be ashamed of themselves. After last month’s Thor, which similarly degraded its token Asian character, and now this film, my mind drifts to the yet-to-be-released Green Lantern whose filmmakers opted for a white incarnation of the title character. For studios to be too timid to green-light anything but a sequel or a by-the-numbers superhero movie is one thing. That those same studios have become so afraid of damaging a film’s marketing potential that a role of substance cannot be played by anyone but a white male is, frankly, sad.

There is much to love about the world of X-Men and its mutated heroes, but First Class makes no effort to do anything new with that world. The film is a wasted opportunity to reinvigorate a flagging franchise and falls instead among the ranks of uninspired superhero outings.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/6/11

Kick-Ass and the Future of Superhero Movies

Superhero movies have been so popular in the last decade it’s almost difficult to imagine what our summer blockbusters were about before they seemingly all became about caped crusaders. There were, of course, hits made from superheroes before 2000 – Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) were both huge – but it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) along with Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002) that confirmed what had already been proven by those earlier films. Superheroes are ingrained deep enough into our pop culture consciousness that even the so-so ones have a decent shot at scoring a profit in their big screen adventures.
 

In 2010, superhero films are still going strong, but for how much longer? When will a lot become too many? Are superheroes headed for overexposure? Next summer, there will be three big ones. Thor comes out in May, followed closely by Captain America: The First Avenger in July, and sandwiched in between them will be Green Lantern in June. Thor and Captain America will both set up characters for the super-sized Marvel crossover, The Avengers, to be released the following summer. All of the aforementioned films will be released in 3D, which means studios anticipate audience members spending up to $45 on superheroes at the cinema next summer, not counting repeat viewings.
 

And those are just the summer offerings. There will be The Green Hornet in January and an X-Men prequel titled, X-Men: First Class to be released sometime in 2011. In the following year, there will be Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman movie, as well as a Spiderman reboot from Mark Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer.

With all these movies still before us and many more behind us, it’s no wonder there have been some less conventional takes on the superhero genre. I’m tempted to label them “post-superhero” movies if it weren’t for the fact that they don’t offer much that’s truly contrary to the more traditional superhero tales.

The long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore’s cult classic Watchmen (2009) had potential to give us something new, but under 300 helmer Zach Snyder’s direction, the film was underwhelming and confirmed many fans’ suspicions that the book was unfilmable.

The ads for Hancock (2008), an original story, suggested that Will Smith’s title character would be a change-of-pace from the typical, morally upstanding heroes. A film portraying a superhero as a drunk suffering from a poor public image was intriguing, but a sloppy script gave the film a muddled tone. As it turned out, even this supposedly tongue-in-cheek superhero movie succumbed to having a big-budget action finale.

Then there’s Kick-Ass, which I missed when it came out earlier this year but recently had the opportunity to watch on DVD. Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also directed the excellent pre-Bond Daniel Craig vehicle, Layer Cake) and based on a graphic novel that creator Mark Millar always intended to become a movie.

Kick-Ass begins as a satirical take on the genre, introducing Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) as a high-school nobody obsessed with comic books. He wonders why anybody hasn’t tried to be a real-life superhero yet and wants to be the first. He dismisses the way comics always give Joe Shmoe superpowers as a result of some freak accident, or how Bruce Wayne is able to afford all that cool equipment that doesn’t exist in reality. So he takes a DIY attitude to crime fighting, buys a wet suit and some nunchucks online and practices badass one-liners in the mirror. Like a true teenager, he calls himself Kick-Ass.

These scenes are wonderful as are the high school scenes, which take more than a few cues from Superbad (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. McLovin, is even here as the son of a wealthy mobster). There’s some funny stuff about how Dave unwittingly becomes the pseudo-gay friend of the girl he has a crush on, and some smart jokes about what a society populated with superheroes would really be like in the age of camera phones and online social networking. When Dave’s first successful scuffle with a couple of street thugs becomes a YouTube sensation, he wastes no time in creating a MySpace page for his alter ego and revels in the glory of the friend requests that come pouring in.

But Kick-Ass quickly breaks its own rules. After getting struck by a car, most of Dave’s bones are replaced with metal, and a lack of nerve endings allows him to get punched without feeling a thing. Maybe this twist is part of the film’s self-awareness and there’s a bit of irony in the fact that this miracle occurs after an embarrassing first attempt at heroism, but mostly it just takes the wind out of a clever premise. Then there is Damon Macready (Nicholas Cage) who goes by the alias Big Daddy and his daughter Mindy a.k.a. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz). Much like Bruce Wayne, whom the film pokes fun at earlier, Macready sinks countless dollars into buying heavy artillery and trains his daughter in martial arts. Early in the film, there’s a joke that mocks the way superheroes are always given cheesy motives of vengeance, but Kick-Ass doesn’t hesitate to turn around a few scenes later and give Macready just that. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife, for which he blames the mobster, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Hit Girl is another source of problems for the film. I realize, yes, that the character is supposed to be provocative and controversial, but she’s all shock. Her father has trained her to be the perfect killer, which explains the violence, but why all the vulgarity? Macready notably avoids such language in her presence, giving her cutesy pet names even while he trains her to take bullets as she wears a Kevlar vest. That scene gets some laughs because of the disparity between Macready’s words and actions. Wouldn’t Hit Girl have been funnier if amidst all the carnage she paused every once in while and acted like the little girl she is? Then there might have been a dash of irony added to a character whose actions are just gratuitous. We watch as Hit Girl pumps lead into bad guy’s heads and slashes them up with knives bigger than she is, and the film expects us to laugh simply because it’s a little girl doing all this.

The performances are mostly good. Aaron Johnson brings the right mix of everyman qualities and teen perviness to the role, Nicholas Cage strikes a balance between understatement as the father and pure camp when he dons his mask, and Chloë Grace Moretz, for what it’s worth, has a lot of onscreen charisma.

Still, once we reach the blood-splattered finale, the movie is no different than the superhero films it parodies in the earlier scenes. Everyday characters achieve great physical feats in the name of awesome fight choreography and a complex plot is resolved with simple action. The movie wants to have its cake and blow it up too.

Kick-Ass was relatively cheap to make and did well enough at the box office to spawn a forthcoming sequel in graphic novel and movie form, but are movies like this the future of superheroes? I’m still waiting for someone to make a true anti-superhero movie, one that really skewers the conventions of the genre and commits to its satire.

In the mean time, there is a host of traditional superheroes lining up to receive our money in the form of ticket sales. My prediction though? After The Avengers and the third Batman movie come out in 2012, the Golden Age of superhero movies will end. They’ll still exist for sure, but will no longer be dependable megahits for studios. That day will be a bittersweet one. Fresh, new stories will hopefully find their way to multiplexes, and our favorite costumed heroes and heroines will return to the pages from whence they came. Before that happens, movies like Kick-Ass will no doubt try to change the direction of the tide, but will effectively only push us further into a superhero overload.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/19/10