Review: X-Men: First Class

Clumsy, hollow prequel makes for summer’s first train wreck.

Neither a fresh reimagining of the stagnant X-Men film franchise or a back to basics return to what made Bryan Singer’s first two efforts in the series often (if never completely) enthralling, director Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class struggles to find its narrative footing and then collapses beneath a Frankenstein script and leaden, arrythmic pacing. Squandering an intriguing retro setting and a premise that ought to write itself on derivative and pained action sequences and mawkish dramatics, the film amounts to a long, tired rehash of a lot of hoary marketing gimmicks. And amid a widely divergent field of performances it includes an aggressively terrible performance by a veteran character actor who ought to know better.

The film starts with a scene lifted verbatim from Singer’s vastly superior X2, detailing Erik Lensherr’s - the boy who will grow up to become Magneto – struggles in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. This film continues his ordeal under scientist/cackling maniac Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), whose sadistic methods kickstart the young mutant’s abilities. Meanwhile in England, a young Charles Xavier befriends homeless, shape-shifting waif Raven, promising her a safe haven despite her otherwordly appearance.

Probably just a headache: McAvoy as Charles Xavier

Jump ahead to the early 1960s, when Shaw is under investigation by the CIA for interfering with U.S. military operations. Agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) infiltrates his casino/brothel and witnesses the mutant powers of several of his henchmen, but is dismissed by stodgy superiors who use her findings as evidence women shouldn’t be operatives. Instead, she contacts Oxford University grad Xavier for insight into mutations. Though the young geneticist’s earnest briefing is likewise met with skepticism, he and Raven are recruited by an agency scientist (Oliver Platt) to head up a division of mutant spies.

An aborted attempt to catch Shaw brings Xavier into contact with Lensherr, who’s spent his adult life stalking his former tormentor around the world in search of vengeance. Lensherr reluctantly joins the fledgling group, accompanying Xavier on a recruitment drive around the country. The script uses a familiar structure for this, one for which TV Tropes.org has a pretty ironic name, and it allows for a surprise cameo given extra spice by the precise use of an f-bomb.

The children of the atom model their fall catalogue.

The new recruits, who include a cab driver named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) who can adapt instantly for any situation and a stripper with dragonfly wings (Zoe Kravitz), continue their training until Shaw orders an attack on their compound. The resulting combat under Vaughn’s orchestration becomes both belabored and mean-spiririted, with repeated and derivative violence that fails to establish the bad guy’s menace so much as their one-dimensionality. One of Xavier’s team is murdered, and another defects, in efforts the script ostensibly intends to bring context to the Xavier-Magneto struggles of the later films. In fact it returns to that ambition time and again (at 132 minutes long, it’s got plenty of time) but seldom completely pulls it off.

Because Xavier, Lensherr, and Raven (played in adulthood by Jennifer Lawrence) are the only fully developed characters the script allows, the rest of the “first class” are practically cyphers, distinguishable solely by their powers or, more cynically, their boy band-esque personality types: the bad boy (Lucas Till), the sensitive one (Caleb Landry Jones) the geeky one (Nicholas Holt). Their training, free of the government’s meddling – us kids can do it for ourselves! – goes off with little impediment or setback, save the semi-humorous kind typical of such sequences. The evil mutants working for Shaw – teleporting Darth Maul knockoff Azazel (Jason Flemyng) and Euro-chic tornado thrower Riptide (Alex Gonzalez) – are similarly underdeveloped.

Shaw’s master plan sets the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Xavier, Lensherr and the gang scramble to stop. The ensuing set piece makes for the film’s best sequence, allowing all the mutants to finally let loose with their powers. Though too much of the sequence details the U.S. and soviet navies looking on in fear and hostility, until its conclusion the battle is well-orchestrated and even suspenseful, a welcome relief after the previous plodding 90 or so minutes. Having said that, plot holes and continuity errors trouble its narrative coherence all the while.

When the battle’s over and the character interaction resumes, the film again finds itself in trouble. The reasons for Xavier’s confinement to a wheelchair are revealed with the grace of a sledgehammer, and with a bathos that defies common sense. Lensherr’s character arc ultimately lands him on the side of the devils, as we knew it would, and in joining him Raven becomes the terrorist Mystique (Rebecca Romihn puts in a cameo as her grown up self, too.)  The film can’t resist indulging in multiple denouement, letting Xavier and Lensherr both come to their epiphanies about their identities.

Fassbender is compelling and charming as the haunted Lensherr, and Lawrence is affecting as the shape-changer with no sense of herself. The worst turn, ironically, belongs to the film’s most seasoned veteran. Bacon is hammy and nonchalant playing a villain who ought to be halfway between Dr. No and Dr. Mengele, and his nonchalance works against the film’s sum dramatic weight. In terms of performance his idea of evil apparently runs more to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor than Heath Ledger’s Joker, in a way that sometimes patronizing; at other times the apathy seems to waft off him. Another weak turn comes from January Jones, playing Shaw’s operative/concubine Emma Frost. Perhaps because of the 60′s setting she recycles her Betty Draper iciness, but only to diminishing returns.

The film’s screenplay carries no less than six writing credits, including Singer and Vaughn both, and the confusion typical of too many cooks in the storytelling kitchen create persistent, debilitating troubles that the final film product never takes time to figure out. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s sometimes tempting to try to spot the segments that must have come from the aborted Magneto-only prequel rumored several years ago, and then to call out the parts that must have accumulated with successive treatments – the toyetic Azazel, the tween-friendly Xavier recruits, the cursory understanding of Cold War geopolitics. All in the name of money, of course, and served up with enough bombast that maybe you won’t notice. X-Men: First Class is a film that doesn’t expect very much from itself. It hopes you won’t either.

- Michael Kabel

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Moving day today

We’re moving our palatial offices today, so there’s no update. Well, partly that and we’re still trying to figure out how Wanted made fifty one million dollars in a benevolent universe. Seriously, fifty one million dollars for a Matrix derivative based on a second-tier Marvel comic? Chalk it up to America never growing tired of watching Angelina Jolie slink and smirk, we suppose. Oh, and weeks of relentless marketing to a demographic killing time between The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight.

In the meantime, we’d like to recommend you check out one of the other blogs we’ve become aquainted with over the past few months:

The Fail Blog: The chronicle of human failure, misery, and misadventure.

The Long Take: Our friend Anil Usumezbas’ intelligent, considered approach to film.

Noir of the Week: An atmospheric yet self-explanatory blog that’s been around for a while. Editor Steve-O is a standup guy.

We’ll be back Wednesday, we promise, just as soon as we unpack all these DVD’s and other less important stuff.

- Michael Kabel

Review: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

 Awaiting the coming of a lion in a film that’s gone to the dogma.

Director Andrew Adamson’s 2005 film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe was by no means a great film, but it was nevertheless a thoroughly likable picture thanks to its great ensemble cast. The menace of the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) was nicely balanced by the stunningly lifelike CGI lion Aslan (voiced with regal authority by Liam Neeson). Though the story’s religious subtext was clearly present, it was at least tastefully restrained. Between the harrowing scenes of the Nazi Blitzkrieg and the charming friendship between ten year old Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) and the “faun” Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy), the film possessed an emotional anchor that generated empathy despite its fantastic setting.  So that film’s relative success makes Adamson’s dreary follow-up all the more baffling and disappointing.

Prince Caspian sees the return of the four Pevensie children to the realm of Narnia thirteen hundred years later (but only one year Earth-time.) The warlike Telmarines have invaded Narnia and all but annihilated its population of centaurs, fauns, minotaurs and other talking creatures. Young Caspian (Ben Barnes), a naive but otherwise decent fellow, is the rightful heir to the Telmarine throne until his villainous uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto) attempts to murder him and claim the crown for his own.  Driven into hiding, Caspian inadvertently summons the Pevensie kids from World War II-era England, and they join forces to defend the surviving Narnians while awaiting the return of the magical (and messianic) lion Aslan.     

The film depends in large amount upon the child actors’ performances, but the kids play their parts with so little distinction that they become virtually interchangeable. Admittedly, this is partly the fault of the action-heavy script, but if the directors of the Harry Potter films consistently get well-rounded performances out of their young actors, why can’t Adamson? Only William Moseley’s Peter, the eldest of the Pevensie siblings, receives three whole dimensions to his character, two of which are “shallow” and “vain.” As for the 26-year old Barnes, he woodenly plays the title character as a younger, blander Brandon Routh with a laughably inconsistent accent: picture The Office‘s Michael Scott imitating The Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya. 

Neeson and Swinton reprise their previous roles in greatly diminished doses, but the first film’s McAvoy, Jim Broadbent and Ray Winstone don’t return for this installment, and that leaves Peter Dinklage as a dwarf named Trumpkins, who unfortunately is relegated to a tertiary supporting role while buried under whole cakes of makeup.  The scene-stealing mouse cavalier Reepicheep (voiced by Eddie Izzard) provides some bright moments of levity, but these are painfully few and far between.

As for the inordinately long chases and epic battle sequences, they all feel reminiscent – if not derivative – of other movies, particularly The Lord of the Rings trilogy and George Lucas’s blatant Rings pastiche Willow. Lewis of course collaborated on the Narnia books with his close friend J.R.R. Tolkein, so some degree of mimicry is understandable. But if you’re going to watch a film with walking trees and rivers come to life, you might as well rent the one with good acting and developed characters. Prince Caspian is also far more mean-spirited than its influences – one particularly distasteful and manipulative sequence features many of the whimsical Narnians slaughtered in captivity.

Adamson ramps the book’s deliberate allegory into overdrive, delivering several moments of outright patronizing morals that promote Christian theology. This would be fine if the filmmakers genuinely engaged the underlying philosophical questions instead of curtly dismissing such thorny details in favor of dogma. (Why exactly did Aslan abandon Narnia to thirteen hundred years of genocide?) An example: at one point Peter wishes for some sign of Aslan’s presence, but is silenced when his little sister Lucy admonishes, “Maybe it’s we who need to prove ourselves to him.” You don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to appreciate the Indiana Jones films and you don’t have to be atheist to enjoy The Golden Compass, but Prince Caspian is a film with one and only one point of view, and shame on anyone who wants otherwise.

Perhaps more troubling is the depiction of the dark-skinned Telmarines as swarthy, barbaric and altogether treacherous. The Narnia books have been frequently castigated for none-too-subtle racist attitudes towards the Middle East, and Adamson’s film does very little to stifle such criticism. In the denouement, Aslan describes the Telmarines as having descended from “brigands” and “pirates.” Note also that Caspian – the rightful, altruistic ruler – is easily the palest Telmarine in the kingdom. I’m not suggesting that the source material be bowdlerized to accommodate a more diverse perspective (ever see Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or The Sum of All Fears?), but surely it must be possible to remain faithful to the spirit of the text without perpetuating hateful stereotypes. (Admittedly, there’s a heroic black centaur displayed prominently, but that’s about it.)

Bigger, louder and dumber than its predecessor, Prince Caspian exemplifies that hoary pejorative “sequel.” Given its disappointing opening weekend at the box office, hopefully the Walt Disney Corporation will learn from its mistakes before adapting the next five installments of Lewis’s sweeping vision.

 - Steve Kabel
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