The Freshmen 15: too many characters, too little development

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2011)

Read on to get *spoiled* on XFC! As a decades-long fan of X-Men, here is what I noticed. I do recommend seeing the film. Great intro. Shaw's and Erik's spot-on German gave me high hopes for the kind of intricately cultural world the X-Men can be. Then it kind of went downhill. The White Queen, here just Emma Frost, was listless and bland. She had no sarcastic and droll dialogue, she was "top-heavy" with not enough rump to back up her legendary figure, and her face was kind of chipmunky instead of drop-dead ice gorgeous. Azazel, the character I was most interested in getting to know, may as well have been made of cardboard, he said almost nothing and we learned nothing about him in this film. Ditto tornado-guy (never got his name until the credits~ "Riptide"). The biggest plot let down for me was Shaw having the helmet we see later in the series for Magneto. I had assumed that the metal surrounding Magneto's head allowed him to create magnetic fields so strong Xavier couldn't penetrate them. Guess anyone can have a metal head with the same effect (oh, wait, how does the Prof read Wolvie's mind?) Anyhow. There are so many other characters that get so little treatment personality-wise, it's almost like flipping through a deck of cards. Angel~Banshee~Darwin~Havok. We just assumed they joined the CIA team because they were asked- very thin motivation. Mystique, Beast and of course Eric and Charles fare much better. Erik is my fav performance in the film, handily beating Charles in the charisma field. His accent kind of flows into a Scottish tinged mess at the end. I was very pleased with the special effects. All were top-notch, but did little to quell bland team development. I kept waiting for Magneto to help Charles build Cerebro, or at least re-build it. Highlights were fun cameos by Wolverine and the original Mystique/Raven. Abysmal and totally taking me out of the film was Moira McTaggart. She had no accent, no discernible culture of any kind, and played a generic hot CIA-agent (?) The original Moira in her cameo in X3 had more gravitas in one scene than this one in the whole film. The one character I was surprised by was Darwin, and was disappointed he didn't "survive" very well. Allegiances shifting at the end seemed kind of stiff. The music was often heavy-handed. The White Queen SHOULD have knocked this movie out of the park, and was the biggest writing/casting misstep. Beasts feet kind of grossed me out, but once he furballed, he was cute. Beast did more in one-week than seems possible: Fashion maven, courtier, rocket scientist, chemist, physicist, psychic "brain surgeon", etc., but it was neat having him around. I'm not salivating for the second installment, but will watch it. XFC suffered from the Freshmen 15, it could stand to trim up and get serious about studying...