In a two month span, Marvel will give movie goers three more additions to their franchise, with the latest additions to complete the backstory for the 2012 release of “The Avengers,” (“Thor,” which will be reviewed soon and “Captain America: The First Avenger” being released on July 22) and the meat in that Marvel sandwich reboots the highly successful “X-Men” film franchise with “X-Men: First Class.”
What makes this movie from the start is that men portraying the two lead mutants, James McAvoy playing Professor Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender playing Erik Lensherr (aka..Magneto), both nail their roles, while both take different approaches.
McAvoy, whose work I have never been all that familiar with, (I walked out of “Wanted” but I enjoyed “The Last King Scotland”) brought the same presence that Ewan McGregor brought to his performance as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the second “Star Wars” trilogy. Both kept the same aura that were created by the previous actors where you could see that these younger versions will eventually evolve to the older versions, but at the same time they were just not doing impressions of Patrick Stewart and Sir Alec Guinness.
As Charles Xavier, McAvoy brings more dimensions to the Xavier character that Stewart could not, simply because of the limitations that Professor Xavier being in a wheelchair brings. McAvoy’s performance shows that Xavier’s intellectualism and pacifism do not simply come from being in a wheelchair, but from is who he is as a person and through his experiences as a mutant.
On the other hand, Fassbender took the blueprints provided by Sir Ian McKellan as Magneto and threw them out the window; much like Heath Ledger did with The Joker in the “The Dark Knight.”
Fassbender perfectly captures the inner struggle that Magneto deals with as whether to fight for the greater good of the world and the inner rage to kill the man who wronged him.
The breakout performance in this film comes from Jennifer Lawrence who dons the blue scales as Mystique. Rather than just being Magneto’s sexy henchwoman that Rebecca RominStamos portrayed the character as in the first three films, this Mystique was is a young, insecure girl who wants nothing more than to be normal, to fit in and have society see her as beautiful.
While this movie is no “Batman Begins” or “The Dark Knight,” Director Matthew Vaughn brings to the X-Men film franchise what Christopher Nolan brought to the Batman franchise, a gritty, realistic world based more on characters and internal struggle, rather than cartoony comic book characters.
The only part that this movie could have done without was using the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as a backdrop, which could have been deleted and the film would have been equally as good and Kevin Bacon as a super vilian just did not play well for me.
Overall, this film was fantastic and I am looking forward to see more stories from this new universe in the X-Men franchise.
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