‘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.