Let’s say you want to take an early-summer break from the weekly onslaught of action pictures and want to trade up in quality to an art-house film. Which actors would attract you? Surely Michael Fassbender, a smoldering sensation in Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds and Jane Eyre and a true MENSA heartthrob. Perhaps James McAvoy, the winsome Scot who played the nave doctor to Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and Keira Knightley’s noble servant-class lover in Atonement. If these two aren’t the Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud of modern movies, they personify better than any 30ish stars the yin-yang of Brit passion and sensitivity. Add Jennifer Lawrence, the Best Actress Oscar nominee for Winter’s Bone, and Mad Men’s pretty, pouty January Jones, and you have an ideal cast for an uplifting transatlantic indie drama — or, since the director is Matthew Vaughn of Stardust and Kick-Ass luster, the makings of a smart fantasy parable.
Instead, McAvoy, Fassbender, Lawrence, Jones and several other actors with upmarket rsums are the stars of X-Men: First Class, a farfetched farrago meant to serve as the “origins story” to the 2000-2006 trilogy about the Marvel comics’ crew of preternatural mutants. First Class alludes not just to the earliest group of strangely gifted students assembled by their genial mastermind Charles Xavier but also to the new film’s self-congratulatory air. It boldly solicits reviewers’ blurbs proclaiming that the picture lives up to its title — that it is less a cash cow than a sacred one, equal to the clat of its celebrated young stars. Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.
