Don't get me wrong, I've seen ALL the X-Men movies, even the profoundly disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine... and although I really enjoyed the latest solo outing for Jackman, The Wolverine... I'm tired of the character and his role in the movies.
All the movies end up revolving around him at some point, with the exception of X-Men: First Class, which I'll admit has grown on me significantly since I originally saw it.
Plus it didn't have Wolverine as the protagonist.
So if I'm being completely honest, XMDOFP (it's just quicker than the full title) was a little challenging for me from that perspective alone.
It also didn't feel like there was enough mutant superpowering going on... I mean I'm pretty sure there was, objectively speaking, but maybe it was just because it's the same old shapeshifting, magnetism and telepathy that seem to be the mainstay of these movies.
The only real time it felt like they took the effort to really celebrate a mutant's powers was the sequence with Evan Peters as Quicksilver, and then he drops out of the movie right after that.
I feel like XMDOFP combined the least interesting talkfest parts of First Class with a bunch of new mutants I didn't really care about (one of whom I forgot his mutant power half way through the movie and another I'm not completely sure what his specific power was supposed to be... both of whom I don't think are ever actually named in the movie itself).
Fortunately they're all in the future and the majority of the movie really happens back in the 70's. They did a good job with the 70's stuff I have to say... the costumes, the combination of actual footage from the time mixed with stuff that's made to look like 70's footage, so that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
And the costumes... just Jennifer Lawrence and Peter Dinklage's costumes alone (hers for the sheer range of stuff she wears, his for the fact that it's the quintessential 1970's suit).
But since I brought it up, can we just talk about Dinklage for a second. That man can seriously do ANYTHING. As far as I can tell there's nothing that says that his character, Bolivar Trask, is a dwarf, but it also feels exactly right... and whether that's just Dinklage or not I don't know, but it never feels like a gimmick or a freakshow.
I also think that he's the only actor that Lawrence doesn't act rings around... whether it's because they're not given a hell of a lot to do like Stewart and McKellen, or whether it's just because she seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting, script-wise.
Don't get me wrong, Ellen Page is also fantastic, but she doesn't have much to do beyond sit with her hands on either side of Wolverine's head.
I think this movie suffers from what a number of the previous X-Men movies suffered from, Too Many Characters With Nothing To Do. The writers and the director want to shove as many characters in as they can but that means that they either need to find something for them to do or else they are just there for the sake of being there. And given that everything needs to service the Wolverine plot (to be fair, he is, rightly or wrongly, the thing that drives this particular story along), there sometimes isn't enough time for some characters to get to do a lot.
Oh, and they screwed up the Beast makeup on Nicholas Hoult... in First Class he had a very bestial look, they altered his whole face, changed his nose and the fur had colour variation and depth. This time they essentially colour him blue. I couldn't work out why he didn't look right through the whole movie, but after seeing the side by side comparison on Google, it's blatantly obvious.
Weirdly, on the flip side of that, this is possibly some of the best Mystique makeup to date. In her blue form, Lawrence definitely looks more mature and you can see the transition from First Class to the Mystique of the original movies played by Rebecca Romijn.
Speaking of which, the next paragraph is a tad spoilery, so feel free to skip over it...
I actually could have done without the surprise cameos by Jean, Scott and Rogue at the end of the movie... those characters have been laid to rest, sometimes very literally, so I didn't really need to see them again. Plus it then opens up the whole "does this mean that the previous movies are no longer canon... did any of the stuff we've already seen actually happen". And I hate that in movies.
Spoilery stuff over with.
I really wish I had better things to say about this movie, but I just don't.
yani's rating: 2 sentinels out of 5
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