Early promise, some bizarrely pointless scenes, and unfortunate sense of being rushed... but still worthwhile

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2011)

I am a fan of the superhero movie and x-men is the top drawer of such movies in the sense that its jam packed with weird and wonderful powers. This doesn't always help when you are wanting certain characters to have more screen time, but the mere premise of a multitude of powers being used as weapons against one another makes for thrilling action.
But this is a digression from the point of the review, x-men first class. On the whole i think i was disappointed by what was brought to the screen, because i am a huge fan of Matthew Vaughn and expected this prequel to kick start the franchise once more with a newer vision that maybe was less family viewing and more dark in its tone.
Elements really worked, with The back story of magneto certainly providing a darker element, and there wasn't any sense of pulling the punches on deaths to characters. There was at the start a real feel for wanting to flesh out characters and the foundations for the story to come later played out at a good pace.
But then there were things that really let this film down. There were scenes which made me cringe, and without making it a spoiler the WORST of these had to be the way nicknames like magneto and professor X came about. And this was one of several moments where they seemed to be in a hurry, like they had a checklist of 'must haves' in the overall plot which were getting in the way of the bits they were more interested in filming. And this is before i get to the noticeable change in Fassbenders accent towards the back end of the film, where all questions about whether they were pushed to a deadline that forced edits and re shoots to be missed out were answered.
Its frustrating because the potential was and is still there, the actors were excellent for their roles and the effort of building their characters, even on the peripheral ones, was better than previous efforts. But Vaughn needs to be given freedom of time, not be constrained so much that he ends up compromising or lowering the standard to meet these ridiculous deadlines.
The hope for a sequel comes just as much to allow for redemption as it does to build on what was started here.