Countdown: The X-Men movies

1. X-Men: First Class

And we have our winner.

You know, for a long time I had no intention of seeing X-Men: First Class. The third movie sucked and Wolverine was a fun movie that relied heavily on the title character. A character that would not be in First Class. I hadn't seen anything with James McAvoy. Having not started watching Mad Men, January Jones only existed to me as the girl from the third American Pie. Almost all of the male roles seemed to have been cast from a “Hannah Montana Boyfriend Catalogue” to the point where one of them was actually Hannah Montana's boyfriend in that movie. It was coming out the same summer as Captain America, a movie I was seeing opening weekend no matter what, and I cared so little about First Class that I didn't even both to watch a trailer.

Then a funny thing happened. Some years ago I signed up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter for whatever reason. For years, that thing went straight into my junk mail folder. The weekend X-Men: First Class came out, the newsletter happened to be sitting in my inbox. Without thinking, I read it and noticed that the new X-Men film was getting really good reviews. I said “what the hell, it's only 10 bucks, let's go see it.”

And I absolutely loved it. Walking out of the theatre, I wondered aloud if it might be even better than X2; having rewatched both now, I don't think it's even close. For a movie I had zero expectations for, I was blown away.

This movie belongs to McAvoy (Charles Xavier) and Michael Fassbender (Erik, or Magneto to most) in the same way that The Dark Knight belonged to Heath Ledger. Both leads are just wonderful. The screen crackles with the energy they bring to their roles. McAvoy's Charles is a quick-talking idealist recruited by the CIA to help stop Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon, who is also excellent) while Fassbender-as-Erik is a lethal, James Bond-esque killing machine driven by vengeance against Shaw. Charles and Erik cross paths while both are attacking Shaw, Charles with the CIA and Erik by himself. There aren't many surprises in the plot the rest of the way: the two find and train fellow mutants into the X-Men before separating over ideological differences. But while Wolverine abused plot twists, First Class succeeds without them with a simple rule: if McAvoy, Fassbender, Bacon or any combination of the three are in a scene, the scene is probably working.

That's not to say that this is a flawless picture. Shaw's fellow villains are woefully underdeveloped. Two of them are nothing but a depiction of a mutant power and the third, Jones-as-Emma Frost, is almost solely sex appeal and bitchiness (to be fair, Jones is pretty great at both of those things). The mutants recruited by Charles and Erik are almost all exceptionally lame. Darwin, whose power is “adapt to survive” (wait, that's an actual mutant power?) gets the old black-guy-dies-first slasher movie treatment. Angel is boring to begin with and annoying after she decides to be evil and attack her friends for no real discernible reason. Banshee, a character that is really cool in concept, is completely atrocious. He's by far the worst of the Hannah Montana Boyfriends, all shaggy hair and pouty lips and doing his damnedest to rip off Chris Pine's voice in Star Trek. Havok is pretty harmless and Beast has some great moments and then other moments where he's upside down grooving to 50s music.

There are more good characters than just Shaw, Charles and Erik, though. Wolverine shows up for a cameo, which was a really nice surprise. I really liked Rose Byrne and Oliver Platt as CIA agents, and Jennifer Lawrence's turn as Raven (Mystique) really grew on me during my third viewing. She's the emotional centre of the film, a character who just wants to belong and fit in but can't because of her mutation. Eventually she splits from Charles, her oldest friend, to go with Erik, who promises to never judge her. The decision feels completely natural and organic, even though it's foreshadowed by three movies with Mystique at Magneto's side.

X-Men: First Class is set against the real-life drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's an interesting backdrop, one that doesn't lend itself well to surprise endings but it's neat to see the way the mutants intersect with “history.” Both the Russians and Americans turn their aim towards the mutants, who hadn't yet been revealed to the world, as Erik implores his fellow mutants to join his side and fight the humans. In fact, the scene where Erik murders Shaw, finally getting his revenge, is the best scene in any X-Men film. Better than Cyclops fighting back tears in the White House after Jean's death in X2, better than Magneto playing chess in a park at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand alone after his best friend's death, better than the opening credits of X-Men Origins: Wolverine with Logan and Victor fighting in history's great wars. Erik telling Shaw “for what it's worth, I agree with every word you said” and then launching a Nazi-branded coin through Shaw's skull is absolutely chilling.

It all adds up to a movie that, while dropping in quality any time McAvoy, Fassbender or Bacon isn't on the screen, completely smokes all of the X-films that came before it. I think it holds up well against The Dark Knight as the best superhero movie ever made. Most impressively of all, it's singlehandedly made me excited for more X-Men movies. X-Men: First Class is just a great, great film.

Countdown: The X-Men movies

2. X2

If X-Men changed the game for superhero movies (and it did), X2 changed it again in a different, more important way. With X2, it was suddenly possible for the genre to deliver real, actual good movies. Hell, it was expected. X-Men paved the way for superhero movies to take our money every summer. X2 let them do more than just take our money every summer. It raised the bar.

So it's a little disappointing to revisit this movie and see it hasn't entirely held up. Some parts of the film are downright painful (such as Pyro attacking the police offers outside of Bobby's house). Too many of the characters are still handled poorly. For example, Cyclops gets to exchange quips with Wolverine at the beginning before immediately being captured. He doesn't appear again until the climax when, under brainwashing, he attacks Jean briefly. And I do mean “briefly,” as he quickly overcomes his brainwashing to help Jean limp around for a few minutes.

But X2 is just such a vast improvement over its predecessor on almost every level imaginable. Wolverine is much better and far more consistent, even with the presence of a botched love subplot with Jean (Wolverine telling Cyclops “Jean chose you” at the end of the movie is so ridiculous, because it's never made apparent that Jean or even Cyclops take Wolverine's love interest seriously; the whole thing seems to be made up in Wolverine's head. Barely any screen time is devoted to the love story and it only serves to further a really annoying trend in superhero films, where the main character has to have a love interest, regardless of how it fits into the story. But I digress...)

Rogue is both better and less important than in X-Men, relegated to the B-squad with Iceman and Pyro. Professor X gets kidnapped and taken out of the picture yet again, which is a little frustrating, but his captive scenes are riveting (the little girl in these scenes is excellent). Mystique is worlds better in X2, a well-rounded villain showing both creativity and cunning. Magneto isn't the main villain, but by siding with the heroes we get to see his point and motivation. He's handled a lot better this time out, too.

Even the action is improved. The assault on the school is stunning, as is the climatic battle at the military base. Lady Deathstrike is really only here so that Wolverine can have an adamantium-based villain to fight and thus is a lame duck character (oh come on, who do you really think is going to win that fight?), but the effect of liquid metal pouring out of her eyes is chilling. And the opening scene with Nightcrawler attacking the White House both impressive and a great way to introduce a new character. Nightcrawler is a really nice surprise here, a tortured character that draws the audience's sympathy. Wolverine may be the star, but Nightcrawler is undoubtedly the movie's heart.

Brian Cox's performance as Col. Striker is absolutely show-stealing. He's the most hateable villain in an X-Men film yet. Striker is so evil, hypocritical and outright wrong that even Magneto plays hero to stop him. He even looks like my jerk of an ex-boss! The best part is Striker doesn't get to repent, he doesn't show remorse and he's so absolutely convinced that he's right, the only fitting end to his arc is being left to die by literally everyone.

X2 isn't perfect, but its ending just might be. After Jean sacrifices herself to save the others, an emotionally-destroyed Cyclops, with a pained look on his face that makes you wonder why they didn't bother using him more in the rest of the movie, stands alongside his teammates as Professor X explains to the president the importance of humans and mutants working together. It's a poignant and fitting end to a really, really good movie.

Countdown: The X-Men movies

3. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

It’s funny: X-Men: The Last Stand is insufferable for many reasons, one of which is entirely too much Wolverine. Yet this movie has even more of him and it’s totally watchable. Weird.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the first in a proposed series of prequel movies to flesh out the primary characters in the first three X-Men movies. That may not end up happening, but this movie does an alright job of digging into Wolverine’s past. The film shows us everything from his childhood to his lifetime as a soldier to love interests to, yes, the moment where adamantium is bonded to his skeleton. Hugh Jackman plays the title character for a fourth time and yet again does a pretty good job with the part.

This movie belongs to Liev Schreiber, however. Schreiber plays Victor Creed, better known to most as Sabretooth (but never referred to as such here) and is Wolverine’s half-brother/rival. There isn’t a single scene he doesn’t steal, and he quickly wipe’s Tyler Mane’s disastrous turn as Sabretooth in X-Men completely from memory. The “bag lady claws” are kind of lame, I suppose, but Creed oozes with swagger. I also quite liked Danny Huston as William Stryker, though that may have been because I’m a Danny Huston fan. In fairness, Huston isn’t nearly as good here as he is in Boogie Woogie, nor is he as good as Brian Cox is in X2 at the same role. But Huston does add a certain little something to the movie even without being flawless.

Other than Schreiber, Huston and Jackman, there’s not much positivity to go around for the rest of the cast. Taylor Kitsch’s Gambit is just plain annoying and I really hated Kayla Silverfox (played by Lynn Collins). Ryan Reynolds, another actor that I really enjoy, is barely used at all. I liked Kevin Durand as The Blob and Dominic Monaghan as Bradley, but both suffer from the same fate as Reynolds and rarely show up. John Wraith felt like a character who was only on the screen so often because he was played by a famous person (will.i.am).

Large chunks of the plot are largely ridiculous and the action is almost uniformly unsatisfying. Everything with Kayla was painful to sit through, particularly the escape sequence towards the end where she helps a bunch of mutant children escape from captivity. Patrick Stewart’s de-aging effects make him look a little too much like Jar Jar Binks, which is a lame payoff to the escape. There’s also a subplot after Wolverine bonds with the adamantium where he escapes the facility and finds a well-meaning elderly couple that help get him back on his feet. They’re cute, but they’re killed off within five minutes of screen time, rendering the whole affair completely absurd. Their murder is immediately followed by a cringe-worthy action scene where Wolverine propels from an exploding motorcycle onto a helicopter flying above him. It’s worse than it sounds.

The big reveal of Deadpool as the final enemy for Wolverine to battle would have certainly been a lot better received if he had been named anything other than Deadpool. What’s presented is a pretty cool concept for a character, but it’s just not Deadpool. It would have been nice if we had gotten that monstrosity earlier in the film because it really deserved more than a five-minute fight scene before getting its head cut off.

Still, even with its problems, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is surprisingly fun. Schreiber is a show-stealer and Jackman was born to play Wolverine. More importantly, the movie doesn’t need to be anything more than what it is: a fun, if mindless, action movie with plenty of Wolverine escapades. Works for me.

Countdown: The X-Men movies

4. X-Men

Good lord, look at that poster. A movie that is ostensibly a metaphor for race relations and civil rights has a tag line of “trust a few, fear the rest.” Really? That’s the message you want?

This is the movie that “started the revolution,” if you will. Sadly, it hasn’t really held up well over the years. The appeal here is pretty much “holy crap, they actually made an X-Men flick.” Eleven years later and we’ve seen plenty of X-Men flicks. Oh well, what can you do? What we’re left with is a standard, if kind of cool, summer tentpole picture.

The biggest crime this movie commits is in assuming that everyone is quite familiar with the source material. I had a friend who once suggested to me that comic book movies were made solely to please comic book fans. Outside of lip service, this is demonstrably false, but if one was really committed to that argument, this is the movie to make it with. The primary characters are Rogue and Wolverine, the new recruits to the X-Men. Everyone else has an established role and motives, but the audience really only gets in the heads of the two “new guys.”

This would be fine except that Rogue really, really sucks in this movie. That’s not necessarily a problem, because most of the X-Men pretty much suck in this movie, but Rogue is the main character. The entire plot revolves around her: Magneto and his Brotherhood (made up of Mystique, Toad and Sabretooth) intend to use Rogue to infect humanity with radiation that, apparently, dissolves people into water. So they kidnap Rogue and Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm and Jean Grey have to go save her. Watching this, I thought “that’s stupid, save the people instead and let Rogue die.” And Rogue was my favourite character in the cartoon, so that’s not a great sign.

See, Rogue isn’t written like she is in the cartoon or comics. Instead, she’s shoehorned a little too hard into the role of audience surrogate. I understand that, because you can’t really have Wolverine be the super-cool bad ass and be audience surrogate, but in forcing Rogue to play that part, almost everything cool about her character is stripped away. The Rogue we get isn’t indestructible and can’t fly. We get a Rogue who takes everyone else’s energy and develop crushes on the cute boy in her class.

Wolverine is perfectly fine as super-cool bad ass and it’s easy to see why he’s the default favourite character for almost everyone watching this movie. Unlike X-Men: Volume 1, he has plenty of importance in the story, but the movie isn’t completely oversaturated with Wolverine the way X-Men: The Last Stand is. It does get a little comical watching Wolverine storm out on the team; it probably only happens once or twice, but it feels more like 20 walk-outs in a 100-minute movie.

Everything else here is either really under-developed or outright bad. X-Men starts the annoying habit in the movies of removing Professor X as soon as they can. Cyclops is completely useless and only acts as a foil to Wolverine. Storm and Jean are basically just there. Mystique is done pretty well and Ian McKellen is a fun Magneto, but Sabretooth and Toad range are laughably bad at best. The radiation effects are unintentionally hilarious.

The movie itself feels very small in scope next to, well, all of the superhero movies that came after it. The action sequences are really basic. But in a way, there’s something really endearing about the simplicity of this movie, and that’s probably it’s greatest strength. It’s fun to go back to the summer of 2000 when this was a mind-blowing film. It’s simple and small and has plenty of bad to go around, but X-Men is pretty cool nonetheless.

Countdown: The X-Men movies

Lists rule, don’t they?

Over the last week I re-watched all of the live-action X-Men films, an act inspired by watching the first volume of the 90s X-Men cartoon. This is the film franchise that is largely responsible for the 2000s boom in superhero movies. X-Men came out in 2000 and by the end of the decade a superhero or comic book property attached to a movie had basically become turned into a license to print money.

Unless you were the poor soul trying to get Jonah Hex made, that is.

For the rest of the week, I’ll be posting a countdown-style list of the X-Men movies, from worst to best. Also, posters!

5. X-Men: The Last Stand

A complete and utter mess. I’m not specifically opposed to killing off important characters in movies. Hell, I’m all for it if the movie is going to do it well. X-Men seems, on paper, like a property that is just aching for some of the big guns to die. Look at the poster above; there are nine mutants on it, none of which is Magneto or his Brotherhood or even one of the Morlocks that start following him throughout the movie. That’s also not counting any of the non-mutant characters and it doesn’t include Iceman or Colossus. That’s a ton of mutants. The easiest thing to do would be to criticize this movie for having too many mutants.

The problem isn’t “too many,” though. The problem is the way everything is handled. Cyclops and Professor X are killed off in short order. Mystique is depowered early on. Rogue and Magneto are depowered by the end of the flick. Rogue is a lot less important than she was in the first two films, as is Iceman. Angel and Colossus rarely show up and don’t have much to work with when they do. The Morlocks are just generic bad guys; I don’t even think Callisto’s name is given.

What this boils down to is writing. The entire creative team changed between the second film (which was mostly consistent with the first) and the third. In the process, characters like Rogue and Iceman, the main “kids” in the first two who had plenty of screen time, are shoved aside here. The worst part is that they’re not really replaced. Ellen Page’s turn as Kitty Pryde is fun, but much like Angel and Colossus, she isn’t around all that much. The lack of consistency in the writing abruptly drops characters we’ve grown to care about and half-heartedly replace them with new characters.

Mostly, though, the movie is just streamlined to be even more Wolverine-centric than the previous two. Wolverine is the “only one who can stop” Jean. Of course. There he is leading the X-Men into the final battle. Even at the beginning of the movie, he has no interest in being a leader. What the hell?

Another problem with the movie is too much happens. Most Kitty screen time is dedicated to Iceman and Rogue getting jealous in a subplot that is barely touched upon. Rogue and Iceman were one of the main storylines in X2 and yet here they’re swimming upstream. There’s an entire, awful subplot with political leaders, too. Josef Sommer, playing “The President” (not any specific president mind you, just The President) gets this really horrible bit where he stares straight into the camera and starts rambling threats to Magneto. It’s pretty surreal, actually, and ripped straight out of a bad 1980s action flick. The camera doesn’t move and he doesn’t move his eyes away from it. It’s the low point in a movie full of them.