I dedicate this review to my girlfriend, whom I repeatedly force to watch movies based on kids' comic books...
My girlfriend turned to me and said "The guy who plays Jean Luc Picard is good."
I wholeheartedly agreed.
Apparently in his youth in the '60's, Professor X was a player, functional legs and all. Let me forewarn all you nerds: In reality, hitting on a girl by talking about her features as a genetic mutation is a low percentage game.
Professor X, and in fact the entire movie reminded me of a combination of Austin Powers and an old James Bond movie. Even the film quality had the graininess of a movie shot in the sixties. Unless that was our non-HD flat screen TV...
(quick warning, some spoilers ahead.)
Aside from the old looking film style the problem with this movie is that you really don't have much interest in most of the characters aside from Professor X and Magneto. The other characters just weren't particularly interesting. My girlfriend asked me who one of the mutants were and I couldn't tell her. I'm not an expert on X-Men, but I was pretty sure he was a made up character and definitely not one of the ORIGINAL ones. And lo and behold he was killed. The only other interesting character was Kevin Bacon, and only because it was Kevin Bacon pretending to be a mutant. Oh and Michael Ironside, looking a little chubs.
I want the real X-men! Where is Wolverine? Oh, there he is! oh...there he goes...
And where is the Stan Lee cameo? Did I miss it? My girlfriend even asked about it. Was he snubbed?
Special effects? Rather bad. Some, Crocosaurus bad.
So was X-Men: First Class worth a dollar? Well for a dollar a movie does have to suck pretty bad and I didn't regret seeing it. Actually we watched this movie for free because we had a promotional Redbox code.
For final comment I once again turned to my girlfriend.
"Well, it's for kids."
Groovy indeed.
