Mediocre action movie with several embarrassing moments

Rating: 6/10 (4 September 2011)

Everything went wrong with the X-men movies when Bryan Singer decided to stop directing them. The first X-men film was an amazing picture with excellent cast and superb directing despite the lower budget. X2 was even better, larger, deeper than the first one. Then Brett Ratner and the producers managed to screw a great story with just simply wrong timing and cutting and unnecessary rewritings of the script. I don't even mention Wolverine which was a mediocre Hollywood trash on the level of Daredevil or Elektra.
The story here in X-men - First Class is not bad, you can feel that Bryan Singer had some ideas during the writing session. But the final result is very, very disappointing. We have a lot of interesting characters here but no time for a reasonable dialog between them. The young versions of our admired heroes are saying the silliest lines - repeatedly! - to each other with harsh, annoying, nonstop score in the background. The viewer has the feeling that it's just a two our long trailer of some summer blockbuster-wannabe - and I know it was meant to be a summer blockbuster but after the first two episodes I was expecting much-much more from this franchise.
Matthew Vaughn is an otherwise extremely talented director, I love all his previous movies but this is lack of any of his virtues. Maybe the ironic view or the humor is missing here which he had before in Stardust or Kick/Ass. X-men is probably not that franchise where you can turn things to a grotesque, sarcastic direction, Vaughn tries it a couple of times and he usually fails. (There are some scenes that are supposed to be funny.) Okay, and what about being cool? Layer Cake is one of the coolest movies ever made, but that also can be said about X-men and X2. Well, this movie is unfortunately not cool at all. Maybe it tries too hard to be cool but this huge effort to overdo everything makes it undignified and embarrassing.
The cast is superb though. It's nice to see that the producers had some money for the actors too not just for the action sequences. James McAvoy is great as always, Michael Fassbender is a perfect young Magneto, he just has some stupid lines and he can't do anything with them. But we have here the amazing Kevin Bacon, the very talented Jennifer Lawrence (watch Winter's Bone instead of this film), the coolest chick of the picture: January Jones (in a very silly costume - most of the costumes were probably borrowed from the wardrobe of Kick/Ass) and such great actors as Michael Ironside for insignificant tiny roles. Sadly, the script doesn't make an opportunity for any of these great actors to do something memorable.
Well, at least the action sequences are pretty spectacular. However, there's nothing you haven't seen before in the earlier movies - or in somewhere else.
Briefly: X-men - First Class is a mediocre Hollywood trash with wasted talents, ruined ideas and nice action sequences. Enjoy if you can.