Superpowers of the Literal Kind In Strangelove's War Room

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2011)

The most persuasive acting in Bryan Singer's classy revenge on Fox is by JFK, who in his 1962 message to the nation conveys thanks for the triumphant end of the Cuban Missile Crisis while stifling what he certainly must know, that American and Soviet missiles spent a lot of time soaring back and forth while telepathically manipulated by the remarkable powers of mutants. The movie's use of the missile crisis definitely performs the function of founding this prequel in the early 1960s and fulfills the doubt of whether or not reality intersects with the chronicles of superheroes.
Mainly owing to the manner of young-at-heart, Brit-grit oomph director Matthew Vaughn sopped up from his roots in Guy Ritchie's super-slick capers, the movie is state-of-the-art and features a few good performances from a few actors whose abilities could've elevated this overreaching artistic cross-promotion, with plenty of action and racket as it renders the genesis of the X-Men, a troupe of roughly a dozen mutants, hitherto. It opens in a Nazi concentration camp, where young Erik Lehnsherr is made to behold a heartbreaking act of cruelty and discovers he can manipulate metals with his mind, but just when he's enraged. He grows up to be Magneto and is played by Michael Fassbender, the sinewy Irish actor who the rumor mill says will become a big star after this movie. For god's sake. He is already truly first-class. But he only becomes well-known after playing Magneto? Moreover, Raven is played by Jennifer Lawrence, recently nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Now she's a blue shape-shifter with scales. The cost of prominence. Why is she great in Winter's Bone and yet so boring here? At Oxford, we meet James McAvoy's telepath Charles Xavier as a young man, not yet a paraplegic. He'll ultimately oversee a school to protect and educate mutants, and he dreams they can relieve the world. His nemesis is Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw, Magneto's merciless oppressor in the Nazi camp.
Other mutants are assembled into one fold or the other. Each one has a specialty. There's your shape-shifter, a hurricane-hurler, a screamer, a fire-shooter, a swift acclimatizer, named Darwin, sure enough, etc. That each would cultivate a distinctive capability through concurrent transformation is a toll of the intelligent design of Stan Lee and his Marvel Comics gang. Nevertheless, it must be limiting to just have one stunt. You need to move with a clique to deal with all given aspects of a given situation.
The plot entails efforts by Rose Byrne's CIA agent Moira McTaggert to exploit Xavier to fight Shaw, who poses a menace to world peace. Precisely how the CIA came across the mutants is a bit vague. Certainly the agency exists basically as an expediency for the script, and the basis for Moira, who appears to really like Xavier, and as a telepath, he should know.
In any case, the fate of the good and evil mutants cross with the Missile Crisis, which was not entirely as we generally understand it. The scene where the mutants stand on a beach and telepathically spar by causing both American and Soviet missiles to ferry back and forth in the sky is, well, amusing, I was going to say, but no, I should view this scene more seriously.
X-Men: First Class is fit weekend distraction that will soon be outdone in the collective fan conscious by the next one and the one after that. It's not a great comic book picture, like The Dark Knight, or a bad one, like RED. It's not in 3-D, which is a clemency. The cast all represents their roles credibly, if not very enthusiastically, and the effects worthily handle those rockets switching directions like characters in Scooby-Do being chased through one door and out another. The combat sequences feature people having awful things happen to them in rather unintelligible ways, but they also make an interesting consistency for Raven the boring shape-shifter.