Bring back Bryan Singer

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2011)

The "X-Men" franchise works best as a giant chess game, in which one team of highly specialised mutants are pitted against another. Like chess pieces, each mutant has its own gifts, powers, counters and weaknesses, and each must swear allegiance to one of two kings: Professor Xavier, who fights for peace and a brotherhood between mutants and humans, or Magneto, a Nietzschean villain who sees mutants as the master race.
Because of the "chessboard" nature of the "X-Men" source material, and the near-queer love affair between the opposing kings, the action in the early "X-Men" movies had an interesting tension. Many of the better moments in the previous films simply involved Xavier and Magneto jousting with words, sparring like modern Wizards, or eyeballing one another over a literal chessboard. Unfortunately none of the film's have particularly interesting scripts, and so eventually they all degenerated into big budget punch ups.
The early "X-Men" comics mirrored the social movements and upheavals of the 1960s. Professor X and Magneto alluded to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the comics did their best to include ethnically diverse characters. "First Class", set in the 1960s, was itself co-written by both a woman and a homosexual (writer Jane Goldman and Bryan Singer, director of the first two movies), and genuinely tries to grapple with Cold Wear era sexism, feminism and racism. Unfortunately the film was directed by Matthew "Kick Ass" Vaughn, a mediocre director who perverts every idea his writers cook up, and corrupts everything in the pursuit of his dumb notions of "cool".
And so much of "First Class" uncritically features female mutants stripping down to their bras, panties, stockings, garters and high heels. Characters are either strippers or whores, whilst others are tied suggestively to beds and tortured. The script wants to align the Nazi's subjugation of Jews to the state sanctioned racism of super powers to modern sexism inside and outside the workplace (CIA agents are constantly belittling women etc), but Vaughn simply can't handle these things. The result is a wannabe James Bond film which salivates over its retro sexist narrative and plays up its racism and sexism for kitsch value (hence the presence of actress January Jones, who stars in the retro sexist "Mad Men").
Still, some interesting ideas slip through Vaughn's fingertips. Rather than a saintly good guy, Professor Xavier becomes a cross between a sleazy pervert and a benign patriarch, and parallels are drawn between his treatment of women and the way other oafish men in the film treat women and minorities. Despite his lofty ideals, Professor X is a pimp, every bit as authoritarian as those he despises.
The film tries to approach issues of race (a token black guy's death is meant to conjure up the ghosts of KKK cross/corpse burnings), but makes big missteps. Vaughn ensures that a team of white American superheroes ends up on Professor Xavier's side, whilst Magneto's "brotherhood" ends up being composed of everyone "foreign", black and female. The film then goes on to focus on Xavier's X-men rather than positioning us to empathise with Magneto and the plights of his minions. In villainizing and marginalising "enemy mutants", the series is guilty of exactly what it tries to condemn. It's a franchise angry at bigoted humans (who villainse the Other, all who are different), but which gets its kicks off whites beating up token, undeveloped evil mutants.
In terms of action sequences, "First Class" is mostly useless. Bryan Singer's action scenes were rather special, using silence and tension well. Vaughn, however, has no spatial sense, eschewing elaborate set pieces in favour for plot excess, cheap shocks and snappy cuts. There isn't a single decent action scene here (a butterfly chasing a screaming kid? Seriously?).
The first three "X-Men" movies starred two heavyweight actors as Magneto and Xavier: Patrick Stewart and the cunningly cast homosexual actor, Ian McKellen. Actor James McAvoy fills Stewart's big shoes well in "First Class", but Magneto's character is a mess, painted so demented and violent that all sympathy is lost. One of the best things about the "X-Men" franchise was the way humans, Xavier and Magneto all were, in a sense, "right", their actions somewhat justifiable. Here, however, Magneto nonsensically bounces from psycho to good-guy to raging psycho.
Of course, the fact that Brett "super hack" Ratner directed the conclusion of Xavier and Magneto's relationship - Xavier's death in "X-Men 3" - makes following this new duo somewhat pointless. Ratner has already ruined these characters' history. Why follow them if their relational climax is ultimately in Ratner's hands?
The film's plot is reheated Cold War nuclear missile nonsense (this is what sparked a global war between humans and mutants?), the kind of tale that bad B movies rendered stale long ago. Beyond this the film plays like a giant game of connect-the-dots, Vaughn too busy trying to tick boxes and link his film up with X-Men lore. Strange then that the film so heavily ignores X-Men continuity. Rather than long-time friends, Magneto and Xavier, in this film, know one another for a matter of moments, Vaughn singularly uninterested in their rich history, rivalry, friendship and relationship. Why make a prequel if you're simply going to rush through X-Men mythology and end up right back at the status quo? And why does the film rush toward robbing a young Xavier the use of his legs, when earlier X-films show Patrick Stewart walking when much older? In any case, Vaughn has achieved the extraordinary; he's made a film worse than Brett Ratner. "First Class" is just so new and shiny we don't realise it yet.
7.5/10 – Worth two viewings.