One Quick Rewrite and This Could Be an X-Spoof

Rating: 5/10 (5 June 2011)

You know there's a problem when you start making up MST3K-style gags in the middle of a movie. X5 has a good opening sequence and goes steadily downhill from there. There is some solid acting and a couple of exciting scenes, but the plot gets more implausible and the characters more laughable with each passing moment. Eventually you realize you're not going to see anything new, that this is as predictable as the typical prequel, and that your time is best spent making up jokes.
It's not good when the most memorable image from the movie is Kevin Bacon wearing Magneto's helmet. This is not something that longtime X-Fans have been dying to see on the big screen as far as I know. Aside from the decidedly unthreatening helmet, Bacon would have been a better villain if he spoke with a German accent the whole time as he did in the introduction. The filmmakers forgot a basic rule of pulp films which is that foreign accents equal villainy.
They also forgot another rule of comic book movies, which is that "comic panel"-style scenes are stupid, as Ang Lee's Hulk demonstrated. Yeah, we get it, this is based on a comic book. We don't need to be hit over the head with it. They also spent too much time focusing on how the characters' names get made up, a now tiresome comic book movie cliché.
Other than Xavier, Magneto and Mystique's story lines, which are largely rehashed from the previous films, there's almost nothing that works as drama here. The march to Nuclear War was as contrived as I've ever seen that done. I honestly think Superman IV did a better job by just having Lex sneak up and push the launch button himself. X5 asks us to believe that all you have to do to start nuclear war is threaten/buy off/seduce two generals (or whoever). As if neither countries' presidents nor other officials have any say in the matter, but are just puppets of these two guys. The powers-that-be then do stuff that's so despicable, Professor X looks like a dolt for continuing to have faith in humanity. It brings to mind Dark Helmet's point about evil always triumphing because good is dumb.
More rehashing comes when this movie sloppily shoehorns in a redo of the "cure" subplot from X3. Beast claims he can normalize his appearance yet retain his powers. But since his powers are a physical ability caused by his body being in the mutated shape that it is, what he says makes absolutely no sense.
First Class also suffers from the old "Submarine Crew" problem of having a bunch of characters that are necessary to perform functions in the story, but are woefully underdeveloped. Half the characters here serve no purpose other than to be special effects. I think even Professor X realizes his new recruits are disposable, since he almost kills one of them in some reckless training exercises without giving it a second thought. The movie signals that it doesn't consider the new characters important by putting together an extremely slapdash special effects sequence to introduce them.
Then there's the "Batman Begins" problem of running out of decent new characters to introduce since they're up to the 5th movie already. Hence we end up with a "G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987)" Big Lob-esque mutant who has the strangest, most inexplicable and illogical power since Spider-Man's spider sense...at least the version that was so sensitive it could warn Spidey if he wrote a bad check. His power to basically "do anything he needs to do when he needs to do it" strains credibility as much as it induces humor. There's usually something off about new characters written into an adaptation that weren't vetted through the normal channels the pre-existing characters were. If you recall, Big Lob's great military specialty in G.I. Joe was that he could dribble grenades like a basketball, or something.
Worse yet, every somewhat interesting new character is dispensed with perfunctorily. Instead of having a big psychic face-off between White Queen and Xavier as a change of pace from shooting, kicking and punching, she's all but forgotten about. Much more could have been made of the human allies of the mutants, but the Bill Richardson-esque CIA agent and Moira basically vanish after they perform their duty in the plot, one of them in the most anticlimactic way since what happened to Xavier in X3.
Let's also consider X-Stripper, whose power is that she can give you one hell of a "buzz" in the champagne room. She makes me question the strategy of rounding up every single mutant to create this elite task force. Let's say there was a mutant who had the power to pass enough gas to stink up an entire aircraft carrier. Would they want him on the team too?
There remain lingering questions. How do the X-Men operate their jet without being shot down? How does Beast single-handedly build the thing in the first place? Exactly what happens to all the energy that one character absorbs at one point? I feel like I was cheated out of a big explosion here. How exactly would Xavier pull off eluding the CIA? Shouldn't he set up shop outside a Pakistani military base to be more inconspicuous?
This movie is ridiculous enough that with one slight nudge it could become a raucous comedy. One mistake was not deflating some of the hot air by putting more humor in the movie. There's only one funny line and few attempts to create any kind of comic relief. This series needs to lighten up. Or at least do something different. That didn't happen here. People are going to get sick of comic book movies if they keep showing us the same movie they've already shown us twenty times before (no thanks to you, Harry Potter, for popularizing this idea). It also helps when these movies make sense.