'X-MEN: FIRST CLASS'
• Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, some sexual content including brief partial nudity and language.• Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes.
"X-Men: First Class" is an homage to the James Bond movies from the '60s - you know, back when Bond was fun.
It's got the Cold War, an epic confrontation between superpowers and a supervillain in a submarine. Matthew ("Layer Cake") Vaughn sees to it that it's a generally light take on back-engineering the struggle between the future Professor X and the future Magneto. Well-cast, well-acted and scripted so that its message of tolerance is front-and-center, this is pretty much all you'd want from two hours and 12 minutes of summer escape.
James McAvoy is young Charles Xavier, the fellow who reads minds and stumbles into the girl (Jennifer Lawrence) Raven, who makes him realize that he and she are not alone. They are the next stage in human evolution. It's the 1940s, and in the age of the atom, humanity - some humans, anyway - are mutating.
One of them is half a world away. That's where Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner, then Michael Fassbender) is a Jew who survives the Holocaust because one Nazi in particular (Kevin Bacon) sees his talents and finds a way to train him.
Cut to years later, when Xavier is finishing up his degree at Oxford and Eric is chasing Nazis to the far ends of the Earth.
Fassbender is marvelously and malevolently focused. McAvoy gives Xavier a comical-clinical interest in his fellow mutants.
They only meet when they are given a common enemy by the CIA. It's the early '60s, and the former Nazi Sebastian Shaw (Bacon) is up to something, recruiting mutants. The most playful scenes in the movie follow Charles and Erik as they go mutant recruiting for the CIA - into strip clubs, for instance. Jason Flemyng, Nicholas Hoult, Alex Gonzalez, Zoe Kravitz and Edi Gathegi (from "Twilight") are among the mutants.
Rose Byrne and Oliver Platt play CIA agents in charge of mutant relations. Vaughn peoples his supporting cast with veteran character players - James Remar is a general, Michael Ironside a Navy captain, Ray Wise a presidential adviser - and pays tribute, visually, to "Dr. Strangelove" and "Basic Instinct."
That last visual reference comes from January Jones. She plays the villain's mutant sidekick in early Sharon Stone-ish '60s white tart ensembles and even has a "Basic Instinct" interrogation scene. She makes a scar-sexy villain herself. The women in the movie wear miniskirts a few years before they became popular and the assembling cast of mutants drop colloquialisms a few decades out of place, but why quibble?
But one cameo - complete with the movie's only perfectly placed f-bomb - reminds us where this one stands in the firmament. The digital ships, digital sets and digitally enhanced brawls lack a single moment as authentically cool as that first snowy meeting we had with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in the original film.
It's all silly summer cinema escape, and if you don't roll your eyes the first or 10th time McAvoy puts two fingers to his forehead to read somebody's thoughts you plainly got nothing out of "Everything Must Go" and "The Beaver."
But "X-Men: First Class" still sings the praises of Marvel Studios' marvelous quality control of comic-book movies. It's good, clean summer movie fun where the money they spent is up on the screen - with actors and effects - so that we won't mind spending our money on it.