X-Men: First Class

I will be completely honest with you --- I absolutely hated X-Men 3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  I'm a huge X-Men comics fan, so it took a lot to completely ruin my excitement in the film franchise; imagining Godzilla using Tokyo as a Slip-n-Slide doesn't quite capture how much those two movies destroyed my faith in X-Men movies, but it's pretty close.  When it was announced that, despite the awfulness of X-MO:W, they were still going ahead with an X-Men Origins: Magneto --- complete with Benjamin Button special effects to de-age Ian McKellan --- my hopes were not high.  But those plans changed, and the Magneto story was incorporated into the story for what would become X-Men: First Class.

Oh, what could have been...!

More importantly, Bryan Singer (director of the first two X-Men films) entered the picture as a producer and Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) was announced as the director.  That might sound only promising to the layperson, but I remember being super excited when Vaughn was originally hired to direct X-Men 3 and frustrated when he quit and the movie ended up sucking horribly.  On the bright side, Vaughn was ballsy enough to later claim that his version of X3 would have been "one hundred times better" than what was eventually made.  Actually, that sounds mathematically possible.  How did it turn out?

Life magazine covers were the best.  We need more homages to them.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with X-Men, here's a quick recap.  Evolution has produced mutations in the human genome, and these mutations have resulted in people with super-powers.  Are they the next evolutionary step?  Will normal humans fear and hate these mutants?  Yes to both.  In the X-Men trilogy, Professor Charles Xavier led his team of X-Men in a fight for peace and equality among humans and mutants.  Xavier's old friend Magneto fought for mutant superiority.  And somehow, the third film was a giant turd milkshake.  There.  You're up to date.

As young boys, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr had vastly different experiences.  While Charles was living in a mansion --- and basically adopting his very own shapeshifting mutant girl, Raven --- Erik was in a Nazi concentration camp.  When it became apparent that Erik could move metal objects without touching them, a Nazi doctor named Schmidt took interest and experimented on the young man, torturing him and even murdering his mother to see the effect on Erik's ability.

Flash forward a few years and it's suddenly the swinging sixties.  Charles (James McAvoy) is a college student, finishing up his thesis (on genetic mutation, naturally) at Oxford and he lives with his "sister" Raven (Jennifer Lawrence).  Charles --- who can read minds --- spends his time hitting on coeds and talking about mutation, while Raven wishes that she her normal form didn't have blue skin.  Erik (Michael Fassbender), who can magnetically manipulate metals, spends his time hunting and killing the Nazis that escaped Nuremberg, always keeping an eye out for an evidence trail that will lead him to the elusive Doctor Schmidt.

Raven auditioning for a Superstar remake

Meanwhile, the CIA stumbled upon a group of mutants while they were trying to find dirty Communists.  Agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) managed to catch a glimpse of Doctor Schmidt --- now using the name Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) --- and a small group of super-powered henchmen forcing a US General to order nuclear missiles to be placed in Turkey.  This prompts MacTaggert to consult the world expert in genetic mutation, Charles Xavier.  Charles (and Raven) travel to the CIA, learn about Shaw's apparent desire to make the Cold War a hot one, and they join forces.  At the same time, Erik has been murdering his way through Nazis and finally found a trail that leads to Schmidt/Shaw.  Erik confronts him, but is overpowered by Shaw and his underlings.  In a happy coincidence, Charles and the CIA arrive, just in time to be (you guessed it) overpowered by Shaw and his underlings.  Seeing their separate failures, Charles and Erik decide to join forces and create their own team of mutant underlings students to fight in this battle and prevent a nuclear holocaust.

...and this picture doesn't even have all the X-Men or bad guys!

There are a lot of characters in this movie, but I think most of them were given the appropriate amount of screen time.  The bulk of the film hinges on the relationship between the fury-fueled Erik and the philosophical Charles, and I think that's fitting; their characters drive the later films, so having them interact in a more friendly manner is pretty interesting.  I thought James McAvoy did a good job as Charles, but his is a very different character than the saintly cueball portrayed by Patrick Stewart. 

Xavier, fighting male pattern baldness with hair plugs.

McAvoy brings out the young academic in Xavier's character; he finds ways to connect with others and teach them, he has the arrogance to overlook the basic emotional needs in others, and he uses his book smarts to hit on random college chicks.  I actually really liked this flawed and somewhat immature character performance --- I think I'm starting to enjoy McAvoy as an actor, which will thrill my wife, because she has a big ol' crush on him.  The breakthrough performance in the film is definitely Michael Fassbender's work as Erik, the man who will become Magneto.  I always enjoyed the condescendingly charming performances by Ian McKellen in the other movies, but Fassbender makes the character his own and makes him pretty bad-ass.  His character is fairly bloodthirsty, but Fassbender does a great job keeping the character rooted in human emotions.  My favorite parts of the film involve Erik just beating the living hell out of dozens of humans in creative ways.  I'm going to go ahead and call it right now: Michael Fassbender is going to be in some pretty big movies in the next few years, because this was a star-making role.

Magneto, preparing to back-hand some stupid humans.

The rest of the cast is fine, but nobody really gets nearly as much to work with as those two.  Jennifer Lawrence was good as Raven/Mystique, even if her character arc did have a somewhat abrupt ending.  The other X-Men --- Zoe Kravitz as Angel, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, Edi Gathegi as Darwin, and Lucas Till as Havok --- were generally just there to show off special effects, but they were all mostly fine.  Hoult gave the best performance out of the group, although that may be because he had a lot more lines that the rest.  Kevin Bacon was decent as the villainous Shaw, but I didn't think there was anything special about him.  He's Kevin Bacon, and that's fine.  January Jones played the under-clothed Emma Frost, and I guess she was okay.  She didn't really show any emotions or say and do anything cool, aside from some special effect shenanigans.  She rarely wore much more than underwear, though, so at least there's that.

Jason Flemyng, a career bit actor, managed to come off as very cool in his portrayal as Azazel.  Sure, it was just because he had dozens of teleportation special effects and he single-handedly killed about thirty inconsequential military characters on-camera, but it was still entertaining.  Alex Gonzalez was okay as the never-actually-named Riptide, but he was little more than a nice suit with blow-dried hair.  Oliver Platt, James Remar, Matt Craven, Ray Wise, Michael Ironside, the uber-Russian Rade Serbedzija and a few other career military-looking actors have small parts in the film, too.  There were cameos by Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn, too, and they were actually pretty awesome moments, but they didn't really add much to the overall story.

This is a comic book movie, though, so there are a lot of silly/campy moments.  While the young Erik's grief-fueled rampage was pretty cool, his extended cry of "Nein!" got a little unintentionally funny toward the end.  When Sebastian Shaw is frozen in time toward the end of the film, the expression on Kevin Bacon's face had the same effect.  But for every moment that was a little lame, there were several that totally made up for them.  For instance, the X-Men got their code names after they had been drinking for a few hours.  That is a surprisingly plausible explanation for coming up with names like Mystique and Havok.  Charles Xavier -- who can read minds and frequently does to impress women --- steadfastly sticks to the same pick-up line, even when he's too drunk to bullshit convincingly.  Funny, sure, but also somewhat realistic.  Yes, the villains in the movie were generally C- or D-list (Azazel, in particular) and they had no personalities, but that's not a bad thing; I'm glad that some characters were left as just cool-looking henchmen, if only because that gave more story to the two main characters.

I enjoyed Matthew Vaughn's approach to directing this movie.  There was a lot of action, but it also felt very organic.  I loved seeing the X-Men treated as students and actually taught things about their powers.  I thought tying the X-Men into the Cuban Missile Crisis was an interesting choice, and I ultimately think it worked out okay.  Vaughn doesn't have great instincts behind the camera, but I he knows how to tell a story and he knows how to balance fun with seriousness.  And isn't that what all comic book movies should be like?

As entertaining as I found the film, I will admit that it it's not flawless.  Matthew Vaughn doesn't have the style or subtlety of Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan, and that can sometimes lead to some awkward moments, like the psychic battle for missile control between Charles and Erik.  And yes, a "psychic battle for missile control" happens.  Azazel's appearance in the film appears to just be because people loved Nightcrawler in X-Men 2, but they wanted to make him a bad guy who already looked evil and didn't need character development --- and, as luck would have it, in the depths of the Marvel Comics archives, they found a character fitting that description.  I was disappointed that Jennifer Lawrence, who was so good in Winter's Bone, plays a character with very little subtlety to her.  There are several character interactions that probably wouldn't hold up to a lot of scrutiny, too, but the specifics slip my mind right now.

Despite all that, I really enjoyed this movie.  It was fun and managed to carry some emotional weight, in the tradition of all successful comic book movies.  I am happy to see new life breathed into this franchise, and I hope they fast-track a sequel, or at least give Fassbender a few more roles where he can be mean.  With any luck, this will start a new series of films that don't pay too much respect to the original trilogy.  For having action and fun, while maintaining two solid character arcs, I give First Class

The Last Station

Biopics can be tough.  Casting an actor to play a real person is always difficult (except for Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela --- that was a no-brainer), but that is rarely the toughest part.  The real crux of a biopic is the story arc.  Just telling the life of a person usually mutes the inherent drama in that life (Public Enemies, anyone?).  In my opinion, the best way to go with these movies is to take a slice from the subject's life and follow one of the many story lines from it.  This notion leads us to The Last Station, which tells the tale of the famous Russian author/philosopher/Count Leo Tolstoy in the last year of his life. 

I entered this picture with only some general knowledge of Tolstoy's work (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and I knew that he was influential on Ghandi), but even that knowledge was unnecessary.  This movie proved to be very "stupid American" friendly, explaining Tolstoy's life and philosophy simply and effectively.  That might sound like a pretty dry movie, but I found it to be enjoyable, containing a surprising amount of humor.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is an old man with a big beard nearing the end of his life.  In his homeland of Russia, the opening credits tell us that many consider Tolstoy to be nearly a saint, and his religious/philosophical followers have established communes devoted to his principles of chastity, equality, and nonviolence.  The movie follows a young Tolstoian, Valentin (James McAvoy), as he is recruited by the head Tolstoian, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), to be Tolstoy's new secretary.  Valentin is not just supposed to write about Tolstoy, though.  Chertkov needs Valentin to act as a Tolstoian spy in the Tolstoy home so Chertkov can manipulate Tolstoy against his wife.  Why would someone want to do that?  Well, Chertkov believes in Tolstoy the philosopher less than Tolstoy the man; if Chertkov can convince Tolstoy to actually follow through on some of Tolstoy's philosophical musings, like renouncing his private property, then the Tolstoian movement will have a founder that lived the movement's ideals.  Of course, that means that Tolstoy's wife, the Countess Sofya Tolstoy (Helen Mirren), would get pushed to the side with her more traditional views on family and religion.  Young Valentin is thrust in the middle of this barely civil conflict as the Tolstoians attempt to get Tolstoy to sign a new will that will essentially give away the copyrights to his writings, making them public domain.  Giving away a famous author's copyrights obviously will limit the inheritance of his children, so Sofya is violently opposed.  At times, Tolstoy seems determined to live his last days according to his writings.  At other times, though, he shares his lust for life with Sofya between their shouting matches.

As the main male character, Valentin gets his own plot thread that runs parallel to this conflict.  Valentin is a "good Tolstoian," which means that he adheres to Tolstoy's writings and has remained a virgin.  His beliefs come into question after some time with Tolstoy, who clearly has not been much of a Tolstoian at all; he is a wealthy Count that had several torrid love affairs in his youth, which he remembers fondly.  While staying at the local Tolstoian commune, Valentin meets a young woman, Masha (Kerry Condon), with whom he begins a relationship with.  Eventually, though, he is faced with the decision on whether he should follow Tolstoy or his heart.

One of the more surprising aspects to this movie is the complete lack of Russian accents.  It's not a bad thing, mind you, since bad accents can really hurt a movie (I'm looking at you, K-19: The Widowmaker), but it is kind of strange when the movie is about someone that is so very Russian as Leo Tolstoy.

The biggest surprise for me was the endearing relationship shown between Leo and Sofya Tolstoy in this movie.  I cannot think of another movie that portrays the affection between an old married couple better than this film.  You know those old, bickering couples that argue all the time, but clearly love each other and can't imagine life without the other?  That's what you get here.  The fights are loud and intentionally hurtful.  The love is childlike, and yet knowing.  They share a bedroom scene --- which is not gross, I promise! --- that is absolutely adorable.  Both Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer received Academy Award nominations for their work, and they were both well deserved.  Mirren, in particular, did a fantastic job.  Plummer's acting was also impressive, but it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge his lovely Tolstoy beard, which made his casting seem perfect.

The rest of the performances are pretty solid.  McAvoy once again plays a nervous young man and that shtick hasn't gotten old yet.  McAvoy's real-life wife, Anne-Marie Duff, turns in a less impressive performance as one of Tolstoy's daughters, but she doesn't do a bad job, per say.  The same can be said for Paul Giamatti and Kerry Condon.  They're not bad, but their roles just aren't very good.  I actually like Giamatti best when he plays finks like this, but there wasn't enough complexity to his character to really satisfy me.  Condon did a fine job with her role, but it was written in a way that made some of her character's choices seem rather abrupt and arbitrary.

The same can be said for the film's focus.  While the relationship between Leo and Sofya was fantastic, the rest of the film was a little limp.  I understand the need for a point-of-view character (in this case, Valentin), and I understand the urge to give him more depth by giving him a sub-plot.  Ultimately, though, that sub-plot needs to be relatively short or serve as an extended parallel to the Tolstoy marriage to truly work.  Here, the Valentin's love story is too long to simply be an aside, but not involved enough to do much for the plot as a whole.  In the end, Valentin professes his love for Masha, but it doesn't feel like the same sort of love we witness between the Tolstoys.  Oddly enough, the praise for the good performances and the criticism for the poor plotting can both be aimed at Michael Hoffman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay from Jay Parini's novel. 

Overall, this is a surprisingly enjoyable movie with humor sprinkled throughout, but it is carried by the performances of Christopher Plummer and especially Helen Mirren.  The movie itself may not be anything special, but their performances help romanticize the notion of growing old with your special someone, even if they drive you nuts.

Wanted

Casting Angelina Jolie in a comic book movie is so obvious, I can't believe that it took until 2008 for somebody to make it happen.  She's already played the physically (and proportionally) impossible part of Lara Croft, so why not take on the world of anti-gravity breasts and zipperless spandex unitards that is comic books?  It's not like they're going to take away her Oscar; Halle Berry already proved that with Catwoman.  So why not have a little mindless fun, right?

Wanted is a comic book adaptation, but the property is not a long-established one, so the story is new to most viewers.  Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) plays an average Joe living a below-average life.  He hates his job, he hates his boss, he hates his girlfriend, he hates his best friend (who is sleeping with his girlfriend), he hates the father that left him as an infant, and he hates the panic attacks he gets when any of these irritate him more than usual.  One day, Fox (Jolie) arrives and tells Wesley that his life is in danger and that his late father (David O'Hara) was a super-powered assassin.  It takes a cross-town shootout and car chase to make that seem plausible, but it works.  Fox takes Wesley to The Fraternity, an ancient secret society of assassins.  The group's head, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), explains that Wesley must assume the mantle of his father and avenge him, or Wesley will surely be killed by his father's assassin, Cross (Thomas Kretschmann).  Naturally, this takes some convincing.  In one of the movie's more memorable moments, Wesley is given a gun (for the first time) and told to shoot the wings off of some flies --- or he will be dead in thirty seconds.  Wesley begins to panic and the world slows down for a few moments, until he shoots.  Surprisingly (well, not really.  It's a movie.  But it would be surprising if you were Wesley), he has shot the wings off.  It turns out that Wesley's panic attacks were the misunderstood symptom of his body rushing extraordinary amounts of blood and adrenaline to his brain.  This superhuman ability can make Wesley able to move faster and notice more than average humans.  I guess that's a little more plausible than a radioactive spider bite.  This ability and natural talent are why Wesley is uniquely qualified to be the man who takes Cross out.

After a brief detour to quit his job and knock out his best friend, Wesley begins to train in earnest.  He is trained in marksmanship by the Gunsmith (successful rapper and emotionless actor Common), knives by the Butcher, how to take punishment by the Repairman, explosives by the Exterminator (Konstantin Khabenskiy), and the assassin life in general by Fox.  One of the important lessons in The Fraternity is the secret of the Loom of Fate.  This loom stitches a fabric that hides a binary code in the missed stitches.  The code spells out names, and The Fraternity kills the people whose names are stitched by the loom.  Yes, that's right...these international super-powered assassins are taking their cues from a magic loom.  Fox justifies this by saying that Fate wants these people dead, so if you "kill one, and maybe save a thousand."  Maybe.  Wesley is eventually experienced enough to take on Cross, but that just starts a whole new set of problems for Wesley.

The acting in this movie is pretty good for an action movie.  James McAvoy handles the lead role well, transforming from wuss to bad-ass in less than two hours, but still maintaining his charm.  He's a little whiny for the first bit of the film, but that has more to do with the character and the writing than his acting.  Angelina Jolie plays a supporting role in the movie, but it's a pretty big supporting role.  Her job here is basically to look sexy and cool, so it's not exactly her most demanding work.  Still, she look comfortable as an action star and plays the exasperated instructor to McAvoy well.  Morgan Freeman gets a rare opportunity to indulge his bad boy side as the leader of the assassins, but he is still playing his typical wise man role.  In other words, he's Morgan Freeman (which is awesome) and gets to swear in this movie.  Konstantin Khabenskiy makes his English-language debut after working with director Timur Bekmambetov on several Russian-language films (including the excellent Nightwatch).  He is just the adorable Russian guy here, but he's likable.  Terrence Stamp makes a brief appearance, and his presence exudes a sense of calm cool to a movie that is all about big and loud.  Sure, he deadpans all his dialogue, but it suits his character.  The rest of the cast turns in decent, but not particularly noteworthy performances, with the exception of Common, who still hasn't convinced me that he should act.

Visually, this film is amazing.  I remember being nervous about the film after watching the previews, but the special effects looked great in the context of the film.  Timur Bekmambetov has a gift for stunning visuals, but this movie is especially impressive.  The man can direct action, too, which is a big plus.  I think this movie's greatest strength is the variety of the action sequences.  There are a lot of shoot-out scenes (which makes sense, given Wesley's character), but they offer a lot of small but important variations.  As the film goes on, Wesley plays a larger and more impressive part in these scenes, until the inevitable huge shoot-'em-up ending.  It was interesting how some fairly subtle clues about Wesley's father are laid out in early action scenes, too.  Heck, I'm even okay with the ridiculousness of the "curved bullet" idea that is so central to most of these scenes.  Aside from the shoot-outs, though, there are a lot of other high quality action scenes.  The driving stunts are far beyond over-the-top, but their ridiculousness actually fits the action in the movie.  And there's some knife fights.  That's always a plus. 

Wanted is adapted from the comic of the same name by Mark Millar, who also wrote Kick-Ass.  This movie takes only the very basic principle of the comic and then makes its own story from there.  That's not a bad move on the screenwriter's part; the comic has Wesley and The Fraternity as super-villains, so there is no true hero to the story.  This script tries to show some heart and does a great job making these characters far more sympathetic than they are in the source material.  That makes this a rare exception, where the Hollywood version of something is far more palatable than the original material.  Of course, the whole "bending bullets" and Loom of Fate thing are absolutely ridiculous additions.  The magic loom is particularly stupid and I am amazed that some screenwriter came up with that as a story element.  It's even more amazing that the idea made the final cut of the film.  The clumsiness with that aspect of the writing (how do we make assassins look like good guys?  Two words: magic loom!) adds quite a bit of lameness to the movie, but it's not a fatal flaw.  Like the comic that it is based on, Wanted was never about the story so much as it was about the ain't-it-cool moments.  In that regard, this movie definitely succeeds.