Director: Bryan Singer
Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Strangely enough, I’ve somehow managed to avoid watching most of the series since starting these reviews. But this last weekend, I’m getting an oil change at one of those lightning fast, don’t-even-leave-your car joints. The guys doing the oil change were talking about superhero movies, and I just joined right in. One of them says this was the best of them all, and I was hard pressed to disagree. So it went near the top of my list to re-watch.
Did I Like It: It’s not hard to say that this is probably the best of the X-Men films*. It manages to weave together many of the elements that made X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) some of the early entries of the superhero boom, and the later films that managed to refresh the series with X-Men: First Class (2011). It even manages to avoid the particularly baffling multiple timelines that weighed down the series as it wore on… Mainly because this is the film that drove the timelines off the tracks.
But then again, as one of America’s fine purveyors of time travel nonsense, I fully approve of even that much.
It also helps that this film largely works. It may not be the bubbly 60s spy movie homage of First Class or the subtle homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)** that is X-Men United. It does owe a lot to The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and it may be the fact that at the moment I’m watching the Dirty Harry films, but Hugh Jackman has been spending the last twenty-five years just doing an Eastwood impression? It’s a pretty good one, sure, but… folks. That’s all he’s been doing.
That all reads like I’m picking at nits, but there were things that I found oddly affecting on this re-watch. And it only kind of has to do with the fact that the whole plot focuses on a megalomaniacal titan of the tech industry (Peter Dinklage) yanking a little too hard on the ear of the president (Mark Camacho) to bring us all to our inevitable doom.
All right, maybe it’s a bit more than kind of, but there’s other stuff here. I’m mainly focusing on the lost Charles Xavier as portrayed by McAvoy. He’s selfish and broken in a world where the only rational response would be to be selfish and broken. Who’s the only man in the entire multiverse who can set him right? The older, wiser Xavier as portrayed by Patrick Stewart. Hell, if I can’t have my future self set myself on the right track, I’d take any number of characters played by Patrick Stewart.
*If one ignores Logan (2017). We’re not going crazy here.
**I’ll die on this hill, but I probably won’t elaborate on it, unless I need to beef up the word count of this review.