OVERLOADED and overcharactered, X-Men: First Class is a movie about the 1960s. Like all movies about the 1960s made past the year 1995, it assumes that every historical moment in that decade happened at the same time. James McAvoy plays the young professor Xavier, the world’s most powerful psychic; Michael Fassbender is Erik, later to be master of magnetism Magneto. The conflict of two worthy adversaries resembles, roughly, the Martin Luther King Jr./young Malcolm X dispute. Cold War paranoia and the Cuban Missile Crisis add historical resonance to the coexistence vs. destruction plot. CIA liaison Moira (Rose Byrne) and the mutant Raven, later Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), add their personalities to the struggle.
But there’s also a ’60s spy-movie motif, complete with split-screen techniques, miniskirts and Austin Powers pickup lines. Fassbender is very suave in black turtleneck or scuba suit as he goes on the trail of a powerful ex-Nazi. Appropriately for how well Fassbender carries himself as an international assassin, the ex-Nazi has become a Bond villain. He, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) has a private nuclear submarine loaded with a serious collection of post-Impressionist art, a literally Satanic henchman (Jason Flemyng) and a lingerie-clad psychic moll named Emma Frost (January Jones). This is, as it sounds, fun.
But it wasn’t enough. As per the title, someone also thought this movie should be a Harry Potter adventure—thus the dead-on-the-screen scenes of the students sharing Cokes, Oreos and “The Hippy Hippy Shake.” By the finale, director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) is lining up his mutants like a boy playing with action figures. Vaughn’s strength, not that I admire it, is to take cartoon violence and make it go too far; as when Erik hits the warpath, smashing up a room or using barbed wire to snake up Russian guards.
Vaughn could have gotten more punch from less blather about healing and more news about the characters we came to see. We don’t get the sense that Xavier ever had childhood trouble because he read the wrong mind; we don’t see the two adversaries agree that people are often no good. And Xavier has no hothead tendencies even when he’s young. Lack of dramatic groundwork leads to the uninspiring finale: a moment of caped and cowled menace made dismayingly comic.
PG-13, 132 min.
Opens June 3
