They team up to join forces with the CIA (represented by Oliver Platt) to battle a Dr. McAvoy doesn’t have Patrick Stewart’s stentorian chops, but he’s able to drop his natural jauntiness on cue and rise to several momentous occasions, and Fassbender turns the chip on Erik’s shoulder into a magnetic force all its own. He’s lucky he also has two first-rate actors in the lead: blue-eyed Scots cutie James McAvoy as Xavier and German-Irish chameleon Michael Fassbender as Erik, soon to be the human magnet dubbed Magneto. Vaughn does linger on his female characters’ miniskirts, though. Nazis round up Jews for concentration camps, characters whom we care about are brutally murdered, there’s an imminent nuclear holocaust - and it all just flies by. The even-less-talented acolyte of Guy Ritchie, Vaughn developed his self-consciously hip, ironic style at the feet of his petit-maestro and wouldn’t know how to put real emotions onscreen if he even had any. Where Singer often let his “It Gets Better”–style gay-rights subtext smother the sheer pop exhilaration of the material, the new director, Matthew Vaughn, allows nothing to bog him down. X-Men: First Class is thoroughly second-rate, but it’s pleasant enough. And there really is an earlier story to tell, a good one, about the youngish Professor Charles Xavier’s decision, way back in 1962, to identify, shelter, and educate the planet’s population of mutants and his fundamental rift with the separatist mutant known as Magneto. ![]() The old principals are old principals, while Hugh Jackman as Wolverine now has his own “Origins” plotline. (Plus, the fanboys have closer emotional ties to their heroes in the earlier, nerdier stages.) In the case of the X-Men saga, which plunged to earth in part three under the hacktacular Brett Ratner after Bryan Singer had found his wings in X2, the decision to start over must have been particularly easy. ![]() Why is it that in movies, comic-book superhero sagas run out of steam by the third installment? In the first part, the superhero attains his or her power in the second, he or she weighs the demands of life and human relationships against the responsibility of superheroism (and its attendant fame) and in the third there are different villains and more occasions for hand-wringing and the star’s fee has become so huge that the studio just wants to wipe the slate clean and go back to the beginning - which is, narratively speaking, the easy part of the whole arc.
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