Here are a few excerpts from the
News Of The World. To read the whole thing, simply click on the link below to head on over to the site.
Find the essence of what people love about the character, strip away all the faff and sidekicks, and dump them in a plausible setting that allows them to be super in a truly cinematic way. That's what Nolan did with the Dark Knight, to brilliant effect. And glory be. It's exactly what Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn's done with the X-Men.
The film begins, as did the first X-Men movie, during the Second World War. A young Jewish lad called Erik (Bill Milner) is torn from his mother's arms at the gates of a concentration camp. In a burst of rage, Erik twists the camp's metal gates with the power of his mind alone - which brings him to the attention of a sinister doctor called Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).
Fast-forward to Oxford in the 1960s, where silver-tongued boffin Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), and his adopted sister Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) have also evolved special powers. Charles can read minds - a talent he mainly uses to get women into the sack. And Raven can change her appearance at will - a talent she mainly uses to look like Jennifer Lawrence.
Unlike the last two X-Men films, First Class is not the multi-coloured, wham-bam spandex-fest you might be expecting. It's all the better for it, though. Instead, it's shot and paced a lot like an early James Bond movie. There's a globe-trotting storyline, a cast who dress immaculately at all times - not to mention some explicit shout-outs to the likes of Scaramanga's mirror maze in The Man With The Golden Gun in the set design.
I'm not saying X-Men: First Class is as good as The Dark Knight, because it isn't. But it IS as good as Batman Begins, and Vaughn and his writing partner Jane Goldman - surely two of the best pairs of ears for blockbuster dialogue in the business - could easily wring a franchise out of this, if they so wish.
When you come out of a superhero movie raving about the special effects, that's one thing. But when you come out raving about the cast's chemistry, the storytelling, and how much damn FUN it was, that's another thing entirely. First Class? Yep. I'd say that's just about the measure of it.
Oh, and their rating? An impressive
FIVE STARS. While it's fair to say that the newspaper isn't exactly Empire in terms of their reviews, this is still a great way to kick off the positive press for the movie which is so far promising to set the X-Men franchise back on the right path. Combine this with the almost entirely glowing first impressions of
X-Men: First Class that we saw over the weekend, and the release of the prequel can't come soon enough!