X-Men: First Class

I'm a little late with this review due to the holiday weekend, but I'm still going to count it as the review for last week.  

Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon

Directed by: Matthew Vaughan

Rating: Loved It

The X-Men trilogy, as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, because I'm not a fanboy, were all OK movies to me.  I know that almost everyone hated the third installment, but one redeeming quality for me was the casting of Kelsey Grammer as Beast.  If nothing else the movie was worth watching for that in my opinion.  Now, First Class has stepped things up to a whole new level.  

The acting in first class was great.  Fassbender and McAvoy both do great jobs portraying young Xavier and Magneto.  The two manage to be very dramatic in a part that I'm sure to some extent was difficult to play with a straight face.  I can't imagine portraying someone like this without walking around with a huge grin the entire time.  Scenes between the two really let us see how close the two really were before the separation that we see in the later interactions.  

The supporting cast was good, too.  Each character was something we haven't seen hundreds of times.  There was no Wolverine or Cyclops or Gambit or other overly marketed characters.  We got to see Emma Frost, Angel and others that haven't been hammered into our movie-going heads.  I really thought each of the characters was in their own way.  I was particularly impressed with Bacon's portrayal of Sebastian Shaw.  I'm honestly not even enough of a fanboy to know anything about the character, but I thought Bacon was good regardless.  

The script was kind of cookie cutter in the fact that we see Xavier and Magneto become friends under difficult circumstances, we get the whole "building the team" montage and see one friend turn on the other later in the film.  We know that's going to happen, but it still seems like the film is just like any other in some respects.  

The effects in the movie were good.  The film moved at a decent pace...it didn't feel like it lasted anywhere near as long as it did.  There were plenty of inside jokes for those that know at least a little about the mythos. The script was decent.  Emotions ran high in parts.  It was just an all around good movie.  I completely recommend it for anyone that is a fan of the super hero genre.