X-Men: First Class wants to be five movies at once, and it occasionally succeeds at being a few of them: One minute it's a stylish James Bond-style retro pleaser, the next a bitter-edged revenge melodrama, the next your boilerplate "embrace individuality" empowerment brief. It is also, of course, a movie based on a comic-book franchise -- in this case, Marvel's long-running, multi-tentacled X-Men saga -- and for that reason alone, it comes with a million other expectations attached. I don't know what director in his right mind would want to take on such a project, but I admire Matthew Vaughn for trying.
And he tries hard to make X-Men: First Class all things to all people, to the extent that some of it sticks quite well. X-Men: First Class opens in Nazi Germany, just as a young lad named Erik Lehnsherr is being wrest from his parents en route to the death camps. Eric is so distraught at the separation that, even as he's being restrained by Nazi guards, he opens and mangles a set of heavy iron gates seemingly at will. This performance intrigues mad-doctor-type Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon, wearing the perfect know-it-all sneer for this sort of villainy), who orders Erik to move a coin on command. When the boy fails, Shaw shoots his mother in his presence, unleashing a storm of rage that reveals the extent of Erik's powers.
Meanwhile, over in Westchester, N.Y., a youngster named Charles Xavier discovers a girl with blue skin hiding out in his kitchen. Fast-forward to 1962: Erik (now played by a dashing Michael Fassbender, in a series of Cary Grant turtlenecks) and Charles (James McAvoy, whose lips always manage to look just-bitten) are hurtling along separate paths but are soon destined to meet. Erik wants to wreak revenge on the man who caused him so much childhood trauma; Charles is an Oxford-educated smarty-pants whose specialty is mutant genetics. (Handily, he can also read minds.) Before long, the two have rather uneasily joined forces and collected a coterie of comely young people with interesting skills, including Havok (Lucas Till), who summons killer hula-hoops of fire from his fingertips; Beast (Nicolas Hoult), a shy nerd whose attempts to "cure" his apelike mutant aberrations backfire; Angel (Zoë Kravitz), a go-go dancer who sprouts dragonfly wings at will; and blue-girl-grown-up Mystique (a subdued but not unappealing Jennifer Lawrence), a willful beauty who, when not completely encased in matte blue scales, can temporarily assume the form of anyone she chooses.
You've seen these characters before, in different, more aged iteratons: X-Men: First Class is a prequel to Bryan Singer's X-Men pictures. (Singer is one of the movie's producers, and is credited with co-writing the story on which the script is based; the screenplay was written by Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman and Vaughn.) Fassbender's Erik will eventually become Ian McKellan's Magneto; McAvoy will assume the form of Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier. And Lawrence's Mystique Jr. will stretch out, and fill out, just a bit more to become Rebecca Romijn's cobalt-hued hottie (a transformation that's alluded to in one of the picture's several X-planatory in-jokes).
In laying out the X-Men backstory, Vaughn has done lots of things right. In the first half, in particular, he's conscious of keeping the story grounded on a modest, human scale that isn't overshadowed by booming special effects. Maybe that's the approach you'd expect Vaughn to take. Together, Vaughn's movies -- which also include the gritty Brit-crime caper Layer Cake and the spirited but not-quite-cohesive Kick-Ass, as well as the flawed but still hypnotic Neil Gaiman adaptation Stardust -- are a motley group that nevertheless come with a sensibility attached. Vaughn is interested in human interaction, in vulnerability, in glancing humor rather than heavy-duty laughs. His instincts are good, though he doesn't always follow them fully -- or perhaps, depending on who's holding the purse-strings, he isn't always allowed to.
And so while X-Men: First Class at first takes its source material with just the right amount of self-deprecating seriousness, it founders in the second half, when it becomes overburdened with squirrelly plot mechanics and an excess of self-evident dialogue. (Sample mutant talk: "Society should try to become more like us.") X-Men: First Class wants to give itself over to stylized stylishness early on: There are some superb Bond-style sparkling phallic submarines, and we get to see January Jones, as mind-reading ice-maiden Emma Frost, in a series of Emma Peel-style zippered jumpsuits. (X-Men: First Class does commingle 1962 Mad Men-era fashion a bit too liberally with 1968 Austin Powers mod garb, but costume designer Sammy Sheldon may have been going for a vibe rather than spot-on historical accuracy.)
I hooted and laughed when Fassbender's Erik extracted a gold filling from a baddie simply by holding his quivering hand aloft, as if he were playing a theremin. There's also a marvelous sequence in which the youngsters amuse themselves while holed up at a CIA research facility: They strut their superpowers to the rockin' strains of "Hippy Hippy Shake." But X-Men: First Class becomes bogged down in its late -- and seemingly everlasting -- action sequences, which it frames in terms of real-life Cold War horrors. The resulting geopolitical action fable is too clever by half, and it's wearying to watch, not least because it drains our attention from the movie's two star attractions.
Because if nothing else, X-Men: First Class is anchored by two superb actors, McAvoy and Fassbender, who embrace this sometimes ludicrous material without acting as if they're slumming (or just collecting a paycheck). Fassbender, born in Germany and raised in Ireland, is something of a magnificent mutant himself -- his Erik Lehnsherr is urbane, unflinching, unapologetically sexy in a menacing way. (He also manages to look surprisingly not-ridiculous in that absurd Magneto helmet.) And McAvoy brings thespian gravity even to that old-timey chestnut of a line, "I can't feel my legs." When he suffers, his eyes stare into space, but they're hardly blank. He and Fassbender circle each other warily, like elegant but very different animals, one feral, one cautious and intuitive. Instead of stooping down to the material, they do the work of elevating it, and they're a pleasure to watch even as X-Men: First Class derails around them. Sometime partners who end up rivals, they're the movie's most spectacular special effect.
Read Movieline's interview with X-Men: First Class co-star Rose Byrne here.