Fassbender and McAvoy create fireworks.

Rating: 6/10 (8 July 2011)

The X-Men have always been among my favorite comic heroes, as their story has always had a more intelligent and political scope compared to most others. Whether it was McCarthyism, issues of race or homosexuality, their battle for acceptance in a world where the unknown is shunned has always been a fantastic metaphor that has followed American culture through decades. This stays just as true here, with the neverending debate between Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr getting it's beginning at the Cuban Missile Crisis. Initially I was worried that putting this superhero story into the historical context was going to come off awkward, but Matthew Vaughn hit the perfect tone for these characters to be implanted, mixing a '60s Bond style with that dense mutant struggle. The driving narrative is a little thin, but the sparks that fly between Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are more than enough to place the film in the top tier of comic book adaptations.
In casting the film, they really made the perfect choices with Fassbender and McAvoy. The former perfectly captures all of the tortured history and desperate need for vengeance of the man that would become Magneto and the latter makes an expert transition from a charismatic boy into an intelligent adult who finally has a real purpose. The film is undoubtedly at it's best when these two superb talents are sharing the screen, battling the contrasting ideas of each man; Lehnsherr's war for dominance placed against Xavier's plea for understanding. That struggle has always been the heart of the X-Men story and here they finally bring it to the forefront, something that was missing from the other films in the franchise. And they could not have picked better actors than these two to tackle that lofty mission. The other actors do relatively fine jobs, no one else really standing out and the only dent in the cast being Jennifer Lawrence, who felt very awkward and self-aware throughout. I'll also never miss an opportunity to praise the beautiful Rose Byrne and I admittedly got a grand kick out of seeing her in lingerie early in the story. In a film loaded with the breathtaking eye candy that is Fassbender and McAvoy (who are both "woa man" sexy here), Byrne definitely stole my eye for part of it as well.
As I said earlier, the one big flaw with the film is that the driving narrative is kind of thin. Everything with Magneto and Xavier is superb, I could watch an entire film of them having a chess match and the action is honestly some of the best I've seen in a comic book film; every scene with Lehnsherr being an absolute badass had me on the edge of my seat. However I feel like they dropped the ball on the Hellfire aspect of the plot, everything with Sebastian Shaw felt very typical of a film in this genre and nothing new was really done on that side of things. The placement of the story in the historical context was interesting and unique at first but by the end it was just another setting for a typical villain story. My one other complaint would be a complaint I have with pretty much all superhero stories that are adapted to the screen. In creating something like this they create it for franchise purposes and thus it never feels like there are any real stakes to anything going on. You know how it's all going to end before you even start the film. However this is one of the rare cases where my concern with that doesn't infringe on my ability to enjoy the story the way it is. Because for a nice change the film isn't about the action; the action is superb but it's about much more than that. It's a film about the struggle for those who are different and the intellectual debate between Lehnsherr and Xavier, and Fassbender and McAvoy absolutely deliver on all of the promises of that.