X-Men: First Class

Our latest attraction in the Summer of Comic Book movies is a Prequel, Reboot—hey, let’s call it a Preboot, OK?—of the successful X-Men movies, wherein a bunch of genetic mutants with a variety of cool abilities far beyond those of average Homo sapiens are discriminated against and react in a variety of entertaining emotional and things-get-levitated-and-go-boom ways. The nerd elite may take issue with a lot of the tinkering with the X-Men canon, if you will, but what are you gonna do? Gotta chop this stuff up and baby-bird it into the gaping beaks of the young’uns, you know? We gotta tack two more movies onto this one! The youth might not really care about Halle Berry and Famke Janssen from the last cycle, so this time around you get January Jones from television’s Mad Men as a psychic telepath or whatever, and she is seriously a mutant actress in that she can barely get the words out from around her teeth, but she has this certain awkward je ne sais quoi that kinda works perfectly when she is parading her blond boobs around in a getup that would play as “formal” on one of those Victoria’s Secret TV shows they run around X-mas. Get it? Anyway, for some serious Girl Power, Jennifer Lawrence really mutates her ass off as the naked blue chick who used to be played by Rebecca Romijn. Lawrence’s character has a lot of typical blue-chick issues since she can go out in public looking like anybody but herself, because that creeps out the squares, you know? She needs to Come Out and Be Proud, do we have to draw you a diagram? But it’s all good, there are some fun turns here from Kevin Bacon doing a German bad-guy accent and some mod clothes, and Michael Fassbender (who was in Inglourious Basterds) as Magneto, a gentleman with a numeric tattoo on his forearm—seriously, that almost is drawing the youth a diagram—can’t live up to Ian McKellen’s arch take from the other movies, but he does a great job being all super-powered and Never Again-y. James McAvoy (last heard on the big screen in Gnomeo and Juliet) plays Magneto’s partner, the young Professor X, and he goes slightly Austin Powers-groovy-baby as the man who leads the X-Men, and it’s too bad they couldn’t do anything about the seXism name, but the movie music is fun and there are worse ways to suck up some air conditioning and popcorn on a summer day.

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