Movie review in the Friday, June 3 Oregonian....
After the blemished rush-job of "X-Men: The Last Stand" and the hilariously awful "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," it's a relief to report that "X-Men: First Class" recaptures the character-driven strengths of the first two films in this superhero series -- while adding a surprising dash of '60s spy-movie style.
This return to form is thanks partly to the director of those first two films, Bryan Singer, returning to the series as producer and story-developer. Matthew Vaughn ("Kick-Ass," "Layer Cake") directs the new flick -- a prequel that has idealistic young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) teaming up with furious young Nazi-hunter Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop the supervillain (Kevin Bacon) secretly engineering the Cuban Missile Crisis. They're joined by bright and lovely emo-twentysomething versions of Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Beast (Nicholas Hoult), among many others.
"First Class" puts big fat exclamation points on the parallels between mutant and civil rights -- it's like a '60s "Star Trek" episode that way -- and maybe the story shouldn't have so many gadgets, costumes, and signature character traits from the first "X-Men" movie making their debut over the course of a couple of days in 1962. But the movie gets so much else surprisingly right.
For starters, it often looks and feels like a '60s Bond film, right down to Bacon's ridiculous-but-groovy super-submarine. Its team-building montages (which take up much of the film's running time) are funny and charming. And Fassbender plays Magneto as a supercool assassin with a completely understandable set of beefs. I spent most of the movie rooting for him, and would watch a "Magneto, 1960s Nazi Hunter" sequel in a second.
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(130 min., rated PG-13) Grade: B
'X-Men: First Class' (The Oregonian, Friday, June 3, 2011)
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