X‑Men: First Class

Matthew Vaughn must have tak­en some small mea­sure of sat­is­fac­tion watch­ing the poor­ly con­struct­ed sham­bles of X‑Men: The Last Stand, the film he (wise­ly) walked away from. That sat­is­fac­tion might have turned to ner­vous­ness when he agreed to take on X‑Men: First Class and fix up, what was, by anyone’s stan­dards, a mori­bund and cyn­i­cal franchise.

Some­how, how­ev­er, he’s man­aged to turn the tide. While not the phoenix like rebirth the X‑Men need­ed, First Class is cer­tain­ly a shot of adren­a­lin to the heart.

First Class doc­u­ments the ori­gins of mutants in the world and the X‑Men as we know them, and Vaughn takes every oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­found expec­ta­tion with­out stray­ing too far from the estab­lished canon of the films and comics. See­ing Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) as a slight­ly nerdy but flir­ta­tious stu­dent, hit­ting on girls around cam­pus, is a fun start and sets the tone for a sur­pris­ing­ly com­i­cal film.

Var­i­ous famed mutants are slow­ly revealed, includ­ing fan favourites, Mys­tique, Azazel and Beast (a sur­pris­ing­ly refrained, pitch-per­fect per­for­mance from Nicholas Hoult), but it’s with the intro­duc­tion of Erik Lehn­sh­err, aka Mag­ne­to (Michael Fass­ben­der) that the film real­ly takes hold.

Togeth­er, McAvoy and Fass­ben­der form the axle that First Class piv­ots around and per­fect­ly switch from com­e­dy dou­ble act (best demon­strat­ed in a delight­ful round-the-world-mon­tage) to the con­flict that’s the sub-text of the movie.

The X‑Men as alle­go­ry for racial/​religious/​social prej­u­dice and hatred has always been crude­ly exploit­ed in pre­vi­ous movies, nev­er get­ting beyond overt­ly sign-post­ed par­al­lels and cheap plat­i­tudes. But with actors of Fass­ben­der and McAvoy’s cal­i­bre to play with, Vaughn goes some way to explor­ing the issue with more subtlety.

As the char­ac­ters’ dif­fer­ences grow with­in an increas­ing­ly uneasy alliance against a mutu­al foe – a won­der­ful­ly extrav­a­gant, Bond-style vil­lain, only miss­ing a white cat to stroke – you start think­ing this a pret­ty good com­ic book movie. And it is, until you remem­ber the high bar set by The Dark Knight and see that First Class isn’t real­ly in the same league.

And that’s a shame. The X‑Men uni­verse is filled with philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal ideas that would make great cin­e­ma. In First Class Vaughn takes wel­come, ten­ta­tive steps in to that world, but this should still be seen as a missed opportunity.