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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DVD Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Dreary, disappointing prequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who traditionally make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him not once but twice. Born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his natural abilities even further, his adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature with no end of machismo, a lowbrow hero for our ever-increasingly lowbrow culture. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, then in a shabby sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its range of flaws makes it a bad one.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Liev Shreiber), who also may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them both more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted as a thrilling opening credits montage that has the pair laying waste to enemy soldiers from several armies (They always pick the right side to join.) In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers whose leader, Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston), encourages their growing bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Jump ahead six years – David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script lets its chronology all over the place - and Logan has found solitidue in a new life working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). But her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence. Offered the chance to have all memory of his dead love erased, he volunteers for an experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium” that will make him virtually indestructible. Once so empowred, the rest of the film finds Logan getting revenge against Victor and Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

Perhaps part of the problem is the murky structure of their source material. As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences into buying “now it can be told…”  comic “events.” Possibly as a consequence, Benioff (Troy) and Woods (Swordfish) have a lot of complicated and tangled back story to address while keeping the action moving. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts spectcle above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s at least true enough to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead, the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jazz hands, with claws: Jackman

Making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute Logan, Jackman is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or so years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking dubious poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that often look mannered.

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s among the most underrated American actors working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as The Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

It’s no coincidence the film appears on home video so quickly. Debuting at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million opening weekend, it nevertheless sank quickly thereafter as comics fans gave only lukewarm response. And no wonder.  Wolverine is not a good film, but more significantly it is not a good film even for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel

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(Note: A previous version of this review appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: Defiance

Sometimes riveting, often flawed World War II true story arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Defiance writer-director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) has a long history of making action movies with more substance – though only slightly – than the typical Hollywood special effects dross. There are actual stories contained within his films, and if an occasional gunfight or epic battle sometimes occurs to amp up each one’s bombast and make it more marketable to wider audiences, he seems content to walk that tightrope. If none of his films are necessarily great cinema, they’re not entirely disposable either.

With Defiance Zwick has potentially the best story material of his career with which to work, and published reports that he spent a dozen years getting its true-life World War II story to screen suggests his respect for the source material. Though the film’s performances are always engaging and the story nothing if not compelling, it nevertheless almost collapses under its action movie shoot-em-up quota and by a script that fails to articulate its ideas past the most obvious conclusions. Though it’s unfair to call the film disappointing, it never achieves its gripping potential, either.

 The film centers on the story of the four Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who fled into the Naliboki forests after the Nazi advance killed their father. The brothers, including Tuvia (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace), Zus (Liev Shreiber, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and Asael (Jamie Bell, Jumper), initially plan to use the forest’s resources to outlast the Nazi occupation. But fellow Jewish refugees continue to wander into the forest, defenseless, and the Bielskis find themselves both caretakers and protectors of the growing refugee population. As word of Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer atrocities filter their way to the group’s ramshackle encampment, Zus begins leading raids both for food and revenge.

Tuvia and Zus are opposites, and their understated hostility, fueled by Zus’ badgering but agitated by Tuvia’s evasiveness, drives much of the film’s early drama. It’s a neat trick that screen tough guy Craig should play the more inward, methodical brother, the one given more to planning than action. By contrast, Shreiber’s Zus is a snarling bear of a man with percolating Socialist sympathies and a deep resentment of the “pretentious,” wealthier Jews who now need the Bielskis’ help. He eventually decamps to join a Soviet partisan band elsewhere in the forest, leaving Tuvia, Aseal, and youngest brother Aron (George MacKay) to help the swelling band of helpless refugees endure a freezing winter that brings with it a Typhus outbreak as well as a constant scarcity of food.

The film runs into trouble when it becomes time for something to happen, and what happens arrives too little or too late to bring the film together into a decisive success. It’s strange that a 137-minute long action film should feel hollow near its center, but the lack of context given to the refugees’ struggle doesn’t ground the film. Other reviews have suggested that the dearth of visible onscreen antagonists – a Nazi villain a la Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, for example – keeps any sense of danger from becoming too palpable. But such absence speaks to co-writer Zwick’s fine intentions but also his struggles as a storyteller. The script confines the struggle to the forest, creating a hyper-reality that should propel the mounting tension; yet the episodic structure (there must be a half-dozen subplots, not all of them necessary) incessantly diffuses forward momentum. Events begin to simmer and then the story shifts to one of the myriad other plot threads.

This lack of concentration also makes the plot and film itself feel longer than they are, which again with a two hour-plus runtime only makes the story feel flabbier. Some of the subplots are worthy of greater development: the camp layabouts who bully their weaker neighbors, the tension between the richer Jews and their poorer relations, a touching romance between Asael and a young villager (Mia Wasikowska). Other plots, including Zus’ bonding with his Soviet compatriots and a going-through-the-motions romance between Tuvia and an aristocrat (Alexa Davalos, Feast of Love), never get the room they need to develop. It’s not that they’re poorly played – Shrieber, Craig, and Davalos could all probably summon chemistry with a brick wall – but that the storylines themselves are as malnourished as the camp’s inhabitants.

As with Zwick’s The Last Samurai, all the character work leads up to a giant set piece battle climax, this time involving the long-feared full-strength Nazi assault. The two set pieces comprising the third act, a firefight against a tank and a bombing raid on the camp, are effectively staged even if they feel perfunctory arriving so close to the film’s ending. Zus’ cavalry charge rescue is also, unfortunately, Hollywood hokum at its finest. When the postscripts arrive – and make no mistake, this is the kind of film for which postscripts were invented – you almost feel as if the end is finally come, even as the story presented begins to peter out. Movies at their best tell us worthy stories of the human struggle. Defiance does its story justice, even if it doesn’t quite realize the same accomplishment for itself.

- Michael Kabel

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 (Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The fan-favorite mutant superhero’s beginnings get a sluggish and unconvincing film treatment.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize not just that comics company but a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him, not once but twice: he was born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his abilities even further. His adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature and a scrapper with no end of machismo. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, in a mean sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its vast array of flaws and mistakes make it a bad one.

Jackman, Shreiber compare mutton chops

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Lieve Shreiber), who may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted in the film as a thrilling opening credits sequence. In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers and led by a Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston) who encourages their bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Hello! Collins as Silverfox

In time Logan finds serenity working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). Her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence, where he volunteers for a special experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium,” making him all but indestructible. The rest of the film is Logan seeking revenge against his Victor as well as Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences with “now it can be told…” comics events. As a result, the script by David Benioff (Troy) and Skip Woods (Swordfish) has a lot of complicated and tangled ground to explain and cover. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts action above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s true to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Likewise many of Shreiber’s leaps and twists as the feral Victor and Will.i.Am’s blinking teleporting  as soldier John Wraith. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jackman, making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute and claw-brandishing mutant hero, is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking outlandish poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that sometimes look mannered.

Bonjour! Kitsch as Gambit

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s possibly the most underrated American actor working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as the Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

On the other hand, David Fincher and Brad Pitt can take comfort that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button no longer represents the most superficial treatment of New Orleans in recent cinema history. The French Quarter club and alleyway look fake and modeled, provoking a realization (for me, anyway) of how many of the other sets and set pieces also looked inauthentic. It’s hard to set wirework indoors, but sets don’t have to look like sets, and they shouldn’t look fake.

The film debuted at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million U.S. haul, and anyway it’s the kind of release that on many levels is only a preview of the expanded director’s cut version that’s inevitably released on DVD and Blu-Ray. But word of mouth is everything with comic book films, and if fans don’t warm to the liberties taken with the larger X-Men mythology they’ll likey stay away. Wolverine is not a good film, but perhaps more importantly it is not even a good film for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel
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