Review: Xmen - First Class

Xmen - First Class

Starring   

James McAvoy as Professor Charles Xavier
Michael Fassbender as Erik Lensherr / Magneto
Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert
Oliver Platt as Man In Black Suit
Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw
Jennifer Lawrence as Raven Darkholme / Mystique
January Jones as  Emma Frost / White Queen
Nicholas Hoult as Dr. Henry "Hank" McCoy / Beast
Zoë Kravitz as Angel Salvadore

Running time    132 minutes

First, I got a beef.  I rent most of the films I review and it is becoming clear that in some cost savings maneuver, rental disks are becoming much less feature rich.  I have found in the past several disk that had virtually no extras where as the purchased disk was anything but!  Even the DVD had more entertainment value than the rental disk.  I plan on writing Blockbuster a note and if you enjoy some value added to your disk view, write to your rental agency with a complaint...  I really don’t see it changing, but I know I will borrow disks to get the full viewing experience, I certainly am not going to BUY their butchered versions...nope.

ok...on to the review.

I don’t know what I expected from Xmen First Class, but it certainly was more than provided.  Don’t get me wrong, the movie is competently made, but it was like the whole soul was sucked out.

The premise is simple enough...during WWII the US and Germany began to suspect that there were people with extraordinary capabilities.  Sebastian Shaw played by  Kevin Bacon begins searching for a powerful mutant in Germany and finds Erik Lensherr who later would become Magneto.  The US though a CIA agency find Charles Xavier and the few mutants that Xavier has amassed.  

The main nemesis is Shaw who wants to wipe humanity from the globe Professor Xavier works with his group to hopefully stop Shaw.  The climax is during the Russian / Cuban Missile moment in history. Of course what went on “behind the scenes” was suppose to be the telling moment.     

I won’t give away the ending if you by chance haven’t seen it yet, but it is pretty badly telegraphed.   Truthfully that is my gripe for the whole film!  Even in the most powerful moments, the director never once asks you to suspend belief.  The parts were played well, but almost too low key!  It is as though you are watching a travelogue.  

The one really fun moment was Charles’ first meeting with Wolverine. But the whole scene could have been axed!

Overall?  It’s really not boring, but there is NOTHING NEW HERE and it just is not so much fun as the previous Xmen fare.   Overall without extras to pull it up...a 7  You got nothing better to do...watch the movie......

Movie Review: Green Lantern

Green Lantern (2011)


 Directed by: Martin Campbell

Written by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, and Michael Goldenberg

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, and Mark Strong

Running Time: 114 minutes

In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Green Lantern movie for years now. Not necessarily the Green Lantern movie now in theaters, however. The movie I’ve been excited for is the script I’ve had in my head for several decades now and never did get around to putting on paper. But that’s where I’m coming from in attempting to review this movie.

Green Lantern is the story of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a cocky and irrepressible test pilot for private defense contractor Ferris Air. His immediate supervisor is his sometimes-girlfriend Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), whose father is CEO. (And they wonder why he chafes at authority.) Hal’s life is quite suddenly turned upside-down by the arrival of Abin Sur, a dying fuchsia-skinned alien whose final act is to bestow upon Hal the power-ring, and attendant responsibilities, of the Green Lantern Corps.

The Corps, as it turns out, is a kind of intergalactic peacekeeping force. The ring uses a mystical green energy to physically manifest the will and imagination of its bearer. Dependent only on his strength of will, Hal can use the ring’s power to create anything he can imagine. It’s the ultimate story of “With great power comes great responsibility.”

But Hal has never been the responsible type. When his best friend Tom Kalmaku (Taika Waititi) quips, “Maybe in their language ‘responsible’ just means ‘a—hole’,” Hal responds soberly, “I sure hope so.” But, as he will eventually find out, “responsible” in this case means saving Earth, the Corps’ homeworld Oa, and by extension the Universe at large, from the giant space-squid Parallax which feeds off of the fear of its victims before proceeding to destroy their planets and wipe out their civilizations.

As the story of Hal’s maturation from loose cannon to enthusiastic space-cop, the movie generally hits all the right notes. But as a space-opera, it falls flat. The Green Lantern comics have roughly fifty years’ worth of accumulated mythology, and the film tries to cram too much of it into this one movie. The effect is much like trying to get into Star Wars starting with Phantom Menace instead of the original trilogy. If you're not already a rabid fan (and quite possibly even if you are), you might find yourself wondering why you're supposed to care.

As a super-hero story it barely registers. What I found missing most of all from this film was the giddy sense of a hero coming into his powers. With everything the writers took from the comic’s expansive history, they seem to have overlooked one basic tenet which every GL origin story I’ve ever read takes for granted: throwing your hero into action before he has the least idea what he’s doing or is even capable of, making him learn on the fly, makes for good drama.

Think back to Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie, the scene in which a young Peter Parker first launches himself into the Manhattan skyline to swing from rooftop to rooftop. It’s one of the most engaging moments ever to come out of the super-hero movie genre because it lets us share in the euphoric terror of a once-ordinary guy discovering in the heat of the moment the extent of his new powers. Green Lantern has no scene like that, though it sorely needs it.

The movie is certainly entertaining. It starts strong, it ends well. It comes unraveled somewhere around the middle, but manages to pull together for a fairly satisfying conclusion. But there is a lot of wasted opportunity there. Green Lantern, with his ability to give substance to the whims of his imagination, should be one of comicdom’s most visually dynamic super-heroes. Green Lantern the movie just feels visually apathetic.