X-Men: First Class

Welcome back to After the Credits. This week I will be reviewing X-Men: First Class and hopefully not spoiling to much of the movie for those who are excited to see it. As you can see I have given X-Men: First Class a solid 4 on the Willis scale and I feel it has earned every point. These are my seconds after conclusion thoughts and reflections.

Fist off, this movie is directed by Matthew Vaughn, the mind that brought us both Kick-Ass and Stardust. After giving the X-Men franchise a youthful re-cast, the script was beefed up with some super mutant action. Professor X is now played by James McAvoy (Wanted), Magneto is played by Michael Fassbender (300), and rounding up the re-casts Mystique is now played by Jennifer Lawrence (Super hottie and The Beaver). The rest of the mutants are well casted, yet little is known about most of these rising young stars, except of course for Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy), all grown up and playing a blue furry monster. Lastly, we have Emma Frost played by January Jones (hottie and Mad Men) adding to the overpopulated (no complaints) amount of hot girls in little clothing.

The movie starts out with a little nostalgia, recapping the events that took place at the beginning of the first X-Men movie, we find ourselves in the Nazi camp where Erik Lehnsherr develops his powers. The story unfolds from there, introducing Kevin Bacon (Footloose) as Sebastian Shaw, the movies chief villain. There are a number of story lines that unfold and end up merging as the mutants are recruited and then trained by Xavier. The story line is well written with only a couple mistakes. There are a couple of concepts that don't quite follow what has been already established in the other four movies (I'm not going to give many of them away, if you are a fan of the franchise you will pick them up too), but all in all I think the writers did well.

At times the CGI was a bit cartoony and didn't really flow. Beasts transformation was portrayed first person, as if seeing through his eyes. Although afterwards, there was some disjointed audio and visual with the syncing of his vocals to his mouth. As far as I can tell all of the powers matched up to their respected mutants, but not all of them were really noteworthy, namely Angel. She has wings and can fly, but the fact that she can spit fire is a bit of a turn off, the effect was less than impressive as she flew across the screen spitting fire missiles at Banshee.

At this time I would like to point out my favorite mutant of the movie, Azazel. Played by the talented Jason Flemyng, Azazel is the father of X2's Nightcrawler and shares the same powers. Super agility and the ability to teleport wherever he wants makes Azazel a cunning and agile assassin. The difference however between him and his son are obvious, Azazel's smoke is red and he is a villain (Nightcrawler is a good guy and has blue smoke).

MINI SPOILER ALERT

For those who are wondering, there is no preview clip after the credits are over, but there is in my opinion the best cameo of all time in this movie. Yes, Hugh Jackman makes a 5 second appearance as Wolverine and promptly tells Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr to "Go fuck yourselves." This is the only appropriate cameo for Wolverine, who is sitting in a bar in Japan smoking a cigar. A small reminder that there is a sequel in the works from the 2009 X-Men Origins featuring the birth of Wolverine which is set to release in theaters at some point next year (2012).

My final thoughts about First Class are this: out of the 5 movies spawned from the popular comic, this one was one of the better ones. There are a couple moments and events that stray from the cohesion to the other 4 movies, but if you can forgive the changes they have made to the back stories of these characters so far, this shouldn't bother you to much too. The only real problem I had with the ending was that Professor X, now a cripple, pulls a "Superman 4" style mind erasing kiss at the end (even if its more appropriate here).