X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Grade: B+

Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Patrick Stewart, Peter Dinklage, Evan Peters, Ian McKellen, Shawn Ashmore, Ellen Page and Halle Berry

Premise: After years of apocalyptic war, the last surviving band of mutants sends one of their own back in time to prevent the creation of some of the most powerful anti-mutant weapons.

Rated PG-13 for intense action and disturbing images, language, brief nudity, and some suggestive material

It’s difficult to not give X-Men: Days of Future Past a higher grade in this review. It really is. For a movie that has to serve as a prequel, a sequel, and a reboot, combines themes and ideas from six previous movies, juggles multiple storylines and has about a dozen major characters, it’s incredibly well put-together. In fact, it has the overall quality package that I thought this summer’s earlier blockbusters—The Amazing Spideman 2 and Godzilla—didn’t quite have. Days doesn’t disappoint, and it fulfilled nearly all my expectations. And yet…

And yet, despite the fact that some parts of the movie are borderline flawless—and I’m tempted to say this is the best possible movie they could have made with this material—something in the movie’s second act felt a bit off to me. I’m not sure what it was. This is a sleek, polished, well-acted, well-paced movie that does justice to its franchise and makes you look forward to future installments, but, even after seeing it twice, I’m feeling that something just didn’t fit. As good as the movie was, my interest started to wan in the middle—both times. A little long, perhaps? A little too talky? Days of Future Past is very, very good, but I can’t quite give it unbridled praise.

Plot

Some time into a dark, terrifying future where nearly-indestructible mechanical beings called Sentinels have been used to hunt down and destroy almost all free mutants, a last surviving group has avoided detection using a simple mind trick. Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) has the ability to send a person back a few days or even weeks to their younger body, so that they know the future. They can know when and where the Sentinels will attack, and they and their comrades can relocate to stay alive. This has proven successful for some time, but mutant figureheads Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) know their race’s only real hope is to send someone back in time, to stop the war before it even begins.

The year to send a person would be 1973, the year of the Paris Peace Talks after Vietnam. The mutant sent back to that year is Logan, better known as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), whose unparalleled healing abilities make him the only person who could recover from the brain trauma of such a significant time-jump. His mission is to find the younger Professor X (James McAvoy), also known as Charles Xavier, and the younger Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who’s real name is Erik Lensherr. Their mission together is to go to Paris to stop a certain vengeful mutant from cold-bloodedly executing a pioneering scientist (Peter Dinklage) who had been experimenting on mutants to try to find a suitably powerful weapon to use against them. This scientist, Bolivar Trask, had been developing the Sentinels, and history says his shocking, savage killing inspired other scientists to embrace his work, to weaponize the mutant gene, and create the weapon that would nearly annihilate mutants. With a revolving door of friends and foes like the shape-shifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), strong and fierce Beast (Nicholas Hoult), and lightning-fast Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Wolverine, Xavier and Magneto race against time to try and stop Trask’s killing. But they quickly find there is significant danger in trying to change the past, and they can’t help but wonder if so dark-hearted a man as Trask should really be allowed to live.

What Works?

This movie’s functionality is astounding. As I mentioned, Days of Future Past follows three original films (2000, 2003 and 2006’s X-Men movies), a prequel (2011’s X-Men: First Class), a prequel spinoff (2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and a sequel spinoff (2013’s The Wolverine). But it works. Days of Future Past remembers things that happened in all six other films and includes elements of them, but it never even slightly feels like a remake or a mere moneygrab sequel. It’s the perfect lynchpin—even while changing the texture of the franchise so that parts of the older films become arguably irrelevant, it’s Future Past’s hearkening back to those old films that makes you so excited for coming installments, because you know it’s on course.

A lot of the credit for Future Past’s quality must go to director Bryan Singer, who’s back 11 years later after directing the two best movies in this franchise, X-Men and X2: X-Men United. Future Past feels fresh and exciting, with the heart and fullness of Singer’s two great installments but also maintaining the high-energy pulse of First Class, the very solid prequel. Just in case anyone’s wondering, the special effects are topnotch, the time-traveling concept works without being oversold or too-easy, and, most importantly, Singer makes this one about the characters. Despite the amount of action and hoopla happening onscreen, it’s the generally familiar, interesting characters who are the focus, as it should be.

Undoubtedly, it helps Singer in this regard to be headlining the film with a quintet of the most charismatic actors in the world (Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Peter Dinklage), plus two always-great vets (Stewart and McKellen). It’s true some of the regulars from the early movies get short shrift, like Halle Berry’s Storm and Anna Paquin’s Rogue, but I’m still impressed with the number of layered, meaningful performances packed into this movie. McAvoy is utterly superb as the younger, more conflicted Charles Xavier, a man filled with regret over loss, injury and failure, and, most poignantly, struggling with the burden of superpowers he never wanted to have, and sometimes still wishes he didn’t have. The Scottish-born actor has starred in a handful of movies that have made a splash at the Oscars (Atonement, The Last King of Scotland, The Last Station), but I’d argue his performance here is his best yet. As his opposite foil, Fassbender reminds us he can make any role completely compelling. Jennifer Lawrence—who was still making a name for herself when she played Mystique in 2011’s First Class—is dynamite here, as usual, combining the tough-as-nails dynamo and enigmatic loner personas she’s portrayed in her most famous roles (The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, respectively). Dinklage is suitably effective in a less-showy but key villainous role, and Jackman is solid in his seventh go-round as Wolverine.

Finally, a nod must be given to Evan Peters, who lights up several key scenes as newcomer Quicksilver. With so much drama going on in two different timeframes, Days doesn’t have a whole lot of time for jokes or fun experimentation with powers, but Quicksilver’s stint onscreen provides some of the movie’s most gleeful material. With some great writing, awesome special effects (his powers might be the new Most Wanted X-Men Powers after this) and some pretty clever visuals, Quicksilver might just be this movie’s X-factor (pun intended, obviously).

*Oh, and if you stay all the way through the credits, there's a 20 second teaser for the next movie, supposedly to be called X-Men: Apocalypse.*

What Doesn’t Work?

There were times early in the going both times I saw Future Past that I thought “this is great. I mean, this is awesome. Could it be better?” And yet, both times, about halfway through the movie, following one major altercation, something started to slip. As I mentioned before, I found myself less focused and less entertained. At 2 hours and 11 minutes, is Future Past a little long? Yes. Does it get a little talky? As good as some of the actual drama is, there are large portions without any action, so I’d say yes. If I’m allowed to be really cynical, I suppose I could say there’s something about a movie that sets up characters and action—only to lead to a big action-packed finale—that’s cliché now, because we’ve seen that kind of thing so many times. In any case, it’s not a good sign when your movie has effectively set up the characters and the stakes, and yet even a big finale that includes uprooting an entire baseball stadium fails to truly excite.

It’s also inevitable that any movie that concerns time-travel and history-changing raises about 800 billion different questions and What Ifs, and, while Days of Future Past has an answer for many of them, it can’t answer all of them.

Content

Ladies, you get to see Hugh Jackman’s butt in this one. Buy your tickets now. In all seriousness, you do see a muscle man’s bare derriere, plus you can debate whether Jennifer Lawrence, in her scenes in full blue Mystique make-up, is naked or not under all that makeup. Thankfully, though, besides these flash-in-the-pan moments, Days of Future Past has more on its mind than sex, or even kissing. There is a lot of intense action, of course, and some of our mutants die in some pretty horrible ways (some even more than once, thanks to time travel), though most of these ways happen without much bloodletting. And there’s a handful of swear words, including an F-bomb dropped by our friend James McAvoy. Things can be pretty intense, but, ultimately, it’s nothing worse than your typical Iron Man, Spiderman, Avengers-type movie.

Bottom Line (Yes, I’ve Finally arrived here)

X-Men: Days of Future Past is really, really solid, working great as a sequel, a reboot, and even a stand-alone movie, and dang if it doesn’t make you want to see the next one. The main actors are all great, there are some awesome special effects, a few pretty big laughs, and some intense drama. After the relative disappointments of The Amazing Spiderman 2 and Godzilla over the past few weeks, this one fulfilled just about all my expectations and exceeded them in other ways. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely worth seeing.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Directed by Bryan Singer

Screenplay by Simon Kinberg

Rated PG-13

Length: 131 minutes