X-Men: Days of Future Past review

X-Men: Days of Future Past (12A/PG-13, 131 mins)
Director: Bryan Singer
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

For those not yet tired of mutant superhero action, here then is the seventh movie set in the X-Men universe. Some have been great, some have been misfires, but the series was shaken up a couple of years ago by X-Men: First Class, which showed us younger versions of the well-worn characters as they were in the 1960s.

Days of Future Past is a sequel to that prequel, and is being sold on the fact that it brings both casts together, so we get Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy as original and young Charles Xavier, and ditto Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender as Erik/Magneto. The one constant has been Logan aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), because he doesn’t age.

It begins in the future following a devastating war, where the few remaining mutants are on the run from Sentinels, massive almost unstoppable machines that are threatening to wipe them out entirely. As Stewart asks in voiceover, is this future set or can it be changed?

The X-Men believe it can be changed and so come up with a plan to send Logan (or his consciousness at any rate) back to the 1970s to stop the chain of events that led to the creation of the Sentinels. In a nutshell this means stopping Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing the scientist (Peter Dinklage) who initiates the programme.

But of course it turns out to be a lot more complicated than that, leading to difficult decisions for many of the X-Men. This is a film that’s always more interested in its characters than its action, and that has to be thanks to its director. Bryan Singer hasn’t directed any of the films since X-Men 2 in 2003, but he shows why he was the right choice to return with a guiding hand, grounding it in the choices made by its protagonists while also being in complete command of the sprawling narrative.

The set pieces aren’t just elaborate displays of special effects and action, but driven by character and plot while moving the story forward at the same time. Generally the films end up turning into the Wolverine show, which as the original trilogy and two Wolverine spin-offs have demonstrated, can get a bit dull after a while. But this is the Mystique show, and everything depends on her.

An early sequence where the lightning-fast Quicksilver helps break Magneto out of the Pentagon is gloriously inventive and thrillingly executed. And it doesn’t skimp on humour either, offering good laughs without descending into camp.

There are a couple of niggles, generally to do with plot points that might find you asking “why?” a couple of times. If you attempted to draw a line through the chronology of the previous films, you’d probably find the timeline has been a bit squiffy anyway, so as with all time travel movies it might be best to just not worry about it. And Stewart, McKellen and co in the future end up getting a bit sidelined.

But there’s real-time danger and darkness linking the future and the past, and the stakes are massive. And thanks to the numerous highpoints and an ending that could possibly be described as perfect, in most regards this is as good as superhero movies get.

Haywire review

Haywire (15/R, 92 mins)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

In a diner in New York state, two people, a man and a woman, chat in a booth. Suddenly it explodes into violence, as the pair grapple for life and death before the woman escapes the restaurant and gets away in a jacked car.

A series of flashbacks fill us in on the covert missions in Barcelona and Dublin that led to the current situation. The woman is Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), a black ops agent, and the man is Aaron (Channing Tatum), who was part of her Barcelona team.

When the spooks higher up the food chain (Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas) get together in a room to discuss them, they're speaking absolute jibber-jabber as far as the audience is concerned. The details of the plot are labyrinthine and barely register, but it matters not a jot because this is director Steven Soderbergh cutting loose and having oodles of kick-ass fun.

Just know it involves the usual betrayal and double cross antics, which leaves Mallory on the run and on a mission to bring down those who set her up.

There are two things that raise Haywire a level above your usual action guff. The first is Carano, a former mixed martial arts fighter. Okay, she’s far from the greatest actress in the world, but her physical performance is hugely impressive. Despite the other big names, she’s unquestionably the star, and watching her lay savage beatings on Tatum, McGregor, Michael Fassbender and countless nameless goons is supremely satisfying.

Secondly, the direction from Soderbergh is just so sharp, so smart, so unlike anything you’re likely to see in a standard action film, that every scene becomes a joy. He brings the cool swagger of Ocean’s Eleven, coupled with his indie aesthetic to bone crunching fights that are brutal and unglamorous yet executed with endlessly dynamic choreography.

As icing on the cake, Douglas is hilarious, Banderas unusually slobby, McGregor a twit, and they're all enjoying themselves immensely, which the viewing audience can’t help but pick up on.

It’s not a million miles away from something Tarantino might rattle out - a marquee cast all taking on smaller roles, probably just for the chance to work with the director, fitting effortlessly into action that’s done in sufficiently different ways that you look on the whole genre afresh.

X-Men: First Class review

X-Men: First Class (12A/PG-13, 131 mins)
Director: Matthew Vaughn
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Now over a decade old, the ongoing movie-mutant saga of the X-Men has provided us with a range of comic book adaptations of varying degrees of quality.

Bryan Singer kick-started the franchise in solid fashion before going on to the high-water mark of X2 and stepping aside for the somewhat anti-climactic Last Stand and the thudding futility of Wolverine, a failure because it existed only to cover already well-trodden ground.

There’s also the lingering whiff of Episodes I-III of Star Wars to provide a warning note that prequelising a beloved franchise is fraught with peril and can be, at best, pointless, and at worst guilty of tainting the memory of the very thing it’s trying to revive.

Praise the summer movie gods though, because X-Men: First Class manages, near as dammit, to avoid the obvious pitfalls inherent in trying to shoehorn a reverse engineered mythology to emerge as an immensely satisfying movie event that’s both rollicking fantasy blockbuster and deeply compelling character drama.

This prequel begins, as the very first film did, in a concentration camp in Poland in 1944. This is where young Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner) discovers that he has the power to move and control metal objects, which brings him to the attention of a Nazi scientist (Kevin Bacon) intent on harnessing this ability.

Zipping forward to 1962, the adult Erik (now played by Michael Fassbender) is still on the hunt for Bacon, who has reinvented himself as an arms dealer named Sebastian Shaw. Meanwhile, telepathic Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has just graduated as a professor of genetics at Oxford and is recruited to help CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), with the existence of mutants having only just come to the attention of the authorities.

This is a lot to get chucked at us in the early stages, but it’s done in a controlled manner that’s all about getting us to the first meeting of Charles and Erik, two of the most powerful mutants around, but with diametrically opposed philosophies.

The beating heart of the film is the relationship between Charles and Erik, referenced to noteworthy effect in the first film, where Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as avowed enemies Professor X and Magneto shared poignant scenes that hinted at the tragedy of their fractured friendship.

It needed a pair of tremendous actors following in the footsteps of Stewart and McKellen to make this work, and McAvoy and Fassbender prove themselves unerringly capable. McAvoy begins as smooth and charming but grows in gravitas as the film progress while Fassbender is simply mesmerising, seemingly getting better with each role and once again demonstrating that he was born to play James Bond.

With Charles driven by his belief in the goodness of mankind and his longing to help Erik, who is fuelled by anger and hatred from the start, it’s a powerful underpinning to several scenes of astonishing emotional impact.

So rich is the characterisation that it’s almost a shame to point out that probably the only thing preventing the movie soaring to a five star triumph is the feeling that just one key scene cementing Charles and Erik’s relationship is missing, that their eventual schism would be all the more heartbreaking if we were more fully able to believe in their friendship.

But that’s a minor niggle, and though Charles is recruiting young mutants in the fight against Shaw, it’s far more than just a teen spin on the X-Men world, which it only occasionally slips into when we’re with the youngsters for slightly too long a spell in the middle.

Setting it during the Cuban missile crisis yields fertile ground, with Shaw intent on starting World War III so that humanity destroys itself and mutants can become the dominant species. The analogous possibilities of this are endless; the rise of fascism, ethnic cleansing and homophobia - it’s all in there without being sledgehammered.

There’s a sensational cameo that shouldn’t be spoiled for you, a few nice in-jokes, and while it’s not all action there’s very little down-time. When the action does come it’s colossal and the result may well be the finest visit yet to the X-Men universe.