X-Men: First Class showed a lot of promise when it was first announced, and the expectation for the film has only been boosted by the impressive looking trailer and movie poster artwork. Though the film didn’t entirely live up to expectations, it was still fun to watch and had more than a few redeeming qualities to make up for an equal amount of less impressive elements.
By far the best element of X-Men: First Class is the strong presence of Kevin Bacon (Super) in a surprise role as the Hellfire Club super villain leader Sebastian Shaw. He’s added to by the acting might of Michael Fassbender (Macbeth (2015)) as Erik Lehnsherr as he makes the momentous transformation into Magneto. It’s one of his earliest lead roles and made a strong introduction for the star, who went on to pick up yet more praise for his roles in Steve McQueen’s Shame and 12 Years A Slave.
The storyline is pretty good too, anchoring itself around historical events like the Cuban missile crisis and taking us back to the days when Professor X was just a kid and mutants hadn’t really been unleashed onto the world. The story picks up with Charles Xavier as he starts to put together the founding sparks of the X-Men to take on Shaw and the other mutants of the Hellfire Club, who are bent on eradicating humanity to leave the planet to the mutants.
Some of the sticking points of the film, though, include the weird Austin Powers impression that James McAvoy brings to his performance as Charles (stop saying “groovy” y’eedjiot) and the complete departure from the comic books for the history of Raven (who you might now know better as Mistique), which is weird to watch if you’ve ever seen the old TV cartoon series or read the original stories.
There’s also a few dodgy special effects mixed in with all the amazing ones, including Banshee’s flying, which is atrocious. Hank (played by Nicholas Hoult of Skins and About a Boy fame) is pretty cool before he makes the full transformation into Beast, but after that the costume just looks a bit naff. If you spend large portions of his time in front of camera scanning his fur line for a zip, you wouldn’t be the only one. It looked like something out of Jim Henson’s workshop circa 1986.
X-Men: First Class is a fun film to watch, but it could have been a bit special if they’d gotten everything in the film to be as good as Kevin Bacon and Michale Fassbender. With a bit more love, quality control and a few script amends this could have been class, but it did make a decent enough introduction for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which builds on the storyline to deliver the missing ingredients from the first film.
X-Men First Class review: 3.3/5
