Reasonable effort, not on par with the original 2 movies.

Rating: 6/10 (2 June 2011)

X-men has always been a bit odd to me. Lots of characters and powers can always make for a fun time, but also for the potential to get too caught up in this side of things rather than strong character development and storytelling.
The other side of it is that for me X-Men has also always been a kind of halfway house between the dark, adult themed batman reboots and the popcorn and cheesy grins of spiderman, I think the original 2 movies of the series carried this off very well with a good mix of decent acting (Patrick Steward, Ian McKellen) vs the more fun elements with wolverine, rogue and a decent interplay between characters like wolverine and cyclops.
Unfortunately a lot of these elements are lacking in the new movie, it's definitely an enjoyable film, but leaning considerably towards the cheesy popcorn style with occasional efforts at character development. Perhaps I was unreasonable in my expectation, but I loved the first two movies (not so much the two after that) and I was really hoping this would get back to that sort of standard, which it doesn't.
The original X-Men movie left me desperate for X2, unfortunately having seen First Class, I'm not that bothered about wanting to see "X-Men: Sophomore Year", and that is quite a disappointment.