Must Try Harder: A Review of 'X-Men: First Class'

Let us start with a rhetorical question: If one is endowed with a genetic mutation (possibly nuclear-catalysed) which allows one to teleport, taking with oneself as many as three or four other people, would one stand idly by as several hundred missiles hurtled towards one and one's allies? If one is Azazel, a demonically red but otherwise characterless mutant as played by Jason Flemyng (really? yes, really) in the new X-Men film, then stand rigid waiting for molecular decimation is exactly what one does.

Well, the word “new” should here be heavily qualified. Inaugurated by Usual Suspects savant Bryan Singer in 2000, this film franchise is based on a wealth of Marvel comics material, has included a central “trilogy”, one dire spin-off, and now comes at 2011 with some kind of period prequel, all those tantalising character grievances and historical encrustations given their own place in the sun. Thus we witness the early lives of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, an Oxford professor with telepathic ability and a Holocaust survivor who can bend metal with his mind respectively. Lehnsherr, soon to become Magneto and Ian McKellan, is here played by Michael Fassbender, and is by far the most interesting of the group. Group? Yes, group. Extended recruitment and training montages introduce us to many more mutants, whose powers become steadily less interesting, and the film becomes bogged down in a peculiar kind of X-cess.

Rather than crafting anything that might resemble a story, director Matthew Vaughn and a host of credited (and no doubt several uncredited) writers play Dramatic Conflict Roulette™ for two hours. In the middle of a scene or sequence up will pop a mutant and their particular dilemma and/or burden, without any regard for tension or plotting. Call me unsympathetic if you must, but when the US and USSR are minutes away from nuclear armageddon, I couldn't care less about a big furry blue guy wrestling with his inner demons. It's not that Beast (his finally awarded moniker) is uninteresting, far from it – here is a guy who wants to look normal, undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he tries a little genetic beautification, and as a consequence clearly harbours shockingly violent tendencies beneath his gosh-I'm-such-a-nerd-me Nicholas Hoult exterior. Interesting then, but when treated with such throwaway clumsiness not in any way engaging.

But there's plenty more random, unstructured characters and arcs floating around. A film following the friendship of Lehnsherr and Xavier, including an awkward simmering rivalry regarding both their class differences and the sought-for affection of the latter's sister Raven, which finally erupts into conflict (and which we were promised) would be an effective thriller, especially if shot with the cool style and grown-up irony of Singer's earlier films and Matthew Vaughn's own Layer Cake. Instead this storyline jostles for position amongst the crowd, the early promise of subtitled foreign-language scenes and Nazi influence of US government policy in the post-war years soon hastily forgotten.

Nor do any of these elements build to any sort of crescendo. There's brief pleasure to be had from the establishing of the Cuban Missile Crisis scenario in which the X-Men make their  (not-quite-public) first appearance, but any sense of synthesis is eradicated once several unremarkable mutant fights start taking place, none impacting upon the other, all rendered palpably mute by ropey digital matte-work. The film loses track of its own rules, and so we end up with Flemyng's red teleporter, standing on a beach, waiting patiently to be eviscerated. Why? Because it's not his turn to have a character moment. It's like watching a pop group politely defer to each other's solos.

Aspects of the subject matter suggest that the intention was perhaps to do a proper version of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen – the film version of which Zack Snyder made a cocked hat of several years ago – yet First Class's excerpts of JFK on period televisions and some nicely 60s touches (the cushions, the curtains, Xavier's willingness to use the word “groovy” in his chat-up lines) are undermined by a total disregard of the politics of the time, or any politics at all. Perhaps it will be argued that the film operates metonymically, the mutant powers a stand-in for various Othernesses, thus letting the film off the hook of actually being aware of, say, the civil rights movement, but the treatment of the sole black mutant is appalling. Rose Byrne's CIA agent along for the ride perhaps fares worse: the speed at which the film forces her to strip down to black stockings and suspenders gave me whiplash, but doesn't quite match the invidious misogyny of her final scene; in between these bookends entire hours go by in which she gets a line or two, despite being present in most scenes. (Maybe this is an homage to the lost-looking Famke Janssen in X-Men: The Last Stand, who – despite being the chief villain – hung around the edges of scenes like a waitress waiting to ask if the food is okay.)

To be a mutant is to be endowed with a gift that makes one different from everyone else, and so ostracised, but which can lead to radical self-empowerment. The extent to which the film does not understand its own concept is revealed when the idea is floated that a serum could be found which makes mutants “look normal”, but doesn't “affect their abilities”. Such an uncoupling of style and substance suggest the coldly fragmentary, unsynthesised format of X-Men: First Class, and most other superhero films bobbing and whizzing around the multiplexes lately. It's not that they lack the courage of their convictions, its that they don't have any convictions at all.

Curses! A Review of 'Kick-Ass'

Like hastily eaten junk food, comic book films continue to repeat in stale belches across cinema screens. It is only logical: no matter how minor the comic it will still have some devoted followers, who will – being likely in their teens and very active in techno-blogo-twittersphere – generate more hype than warranted, increasing the slim possibility of a decent opening weekend before inevitable and hasty evaporation of ticket sales and audience interest. In addition to this financial concern, the comic turn is natural considering the movement of mainstream American filmmaking towards hollowness, callousness and self-justified viciousness.

It seemed that Kick-Ass would be something of a relief from all this. Promising a knowing inclusion of the dramatic and aesthetic expectations of the “young adult” comic book genre (a deadly eleven-year old girl!), but with a critical eye towards the link between this film world and the real world: how are the goals and ambitions of the average American teenager formed and manipulated by widespread generic banality? The real and the fantasy feed off each other, currently only able to offer a trajectory that spirals ever downward. There is certainly room for a film attacking these issues and which, even if not excoriating the peddlers of morally lazy trash, at least opens up alternative avenues of thought to those of unreal empowerment through dress-up and revenge.

Kick-Ass seems to engage with these issues, but very quickly backs away. Or, more accurately, becomes drawn in by the lure of easy answers through violence. The protagonist, Dave Lizewski, is tired of being a non-presence at school and getting casually mugged on his way home. Donning a mask and batons to fight crime, he is promptly beaten up and stabbed. A bracing concept. Yet there is something unsettling about the stabbing. Digital blood, followed by a comedic overwrought car crash. This is not bathos, it is glorification.

(These digital spurts of blood are becoming increasingly prevalent in Blockbuster cinema, again a result of the comic influence. But while the panels of Frank Miller feature a splatter of red across them, the brutality inherent in this captured moment is lost when translated to the screen. These gushes of obvious post-production tinkering plainly separate violence and spectacle, focussing exclusively on the latter. It may be a direct translation of the visual style of the comic onto the film, as it was in Sin City and 300, but the different medium alters the meaning of the aesthetic. Grittiness is expressed differently on a printed page than it is on the silver screen at twenty-four frames a second.)

The violence in Kick-Ass functions narratively (initially at least) as the unpleasant intrusion of the real into the fantasy; however, it is filmed in such a way that it merely fuels the fantasy, driving it further into masturbatory indulgence.

Fine, then. This is not to be the To The Lighthouse of comic book films (as last years Watchmen could and should have been, in the same way that the sharp source material by Alan Moore was so comprehensive it made all further graphic novels about masked avengers redundant). As it develops further, and Lizewski (superhero name: Kick-Ass) becomes a media star through youtube footage and canny social networking, there is plenty of room made available for satire to creep in. Unfortunately, nothing except sensationalism manages to survive the ensuing din. The film aims for cynical but ends up utterly charmless.

A more successful duo of crime fighters is introduced, who are at war with a villainous yet wholly undefined syndicate responsible (indirectly, it must be highlighted) for the death of an inevitably unnamed and voiceless female figure of maternal comfort (worryingly, Lizewski’s mother is also depicted as dying silently and indolently). These various characters all become embroiled in possibly the most lazily plotted of such scripts to date, and less and less gets in the way of violent action sequences (each one with a soundtrack stolen from elsewhere: John Murphy’s signature cues for 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, and Ennio Morricone’s overexposed For a Few Dollars More theme).

Director Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, made in the ebb of hype following Guy Ritchie’s own London gangster films (which Vaughn himself co-produced), was one of the most stylish and inventive British films of the last ten years, easily earning the title of The Long Good Friday for the twenty-first century. Since this, however, Vaughn has increasingly looked like a director-for-hire, even though he co-produced and co-wrote Kick-Ass. The most memorable parts of the film are the zaniest, and feel distinctly like they have been conceived of solely to keep Vaughn interested in his production (and it takes something pretty zany for interest to be retained in a film which cues up the song ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ when two superheroes meet).

We end up on the same damn rooftop that Iron Man 2 ended on: man and woman sharing an intimate moment, a poor digital recreation of New York behind them, the unwelcome promise of a sequel, and not a single thought given to the disproportionate collateral damage wrought during the preceding “adventures”. Kick-Ass in the end tells us nothing more than that the temptation for violent catharsis through a cartoon lens is too much even for what seems a highly talented crew. The generic template is adhered to so closely that attempts to interpret any critical discourse on the unpleasantness unfolding become increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. This is not to say it is not entertaining: it’s a film with great comic timing and some fresh ideas up its sleeve. That it feels so hollow in the end should be a lesson for future filmmakers to avoid indulging in the temptations that are here so fully given in to.

Further reading:

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of 'Watchmen'