X-Men: First Class (2011)

There's a moment in X-Men: First Class where Michael Fassbender's Erik Lensherr, all cold fury and purpose, tracks down a Nazi war criminal and dismantles him without breaking a sweat. It's tense, stylish, and genuinely thrilling. It also makes you quietly furious, because it shows exactly what this film could have been, and too rarely is.

The premise is genuinely strong. Taking Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr back to the beginning, to the friendship before the fracture, is the right idea. And James McAvoy and Fassbender are absolutely the right men for it. They've got real chemistry, the kind where you feel the warmth between two people even as you know it's all headed somewhere painful. Their ideological argument, hope and trust on one side, rage and vengeance on the other, lands with weight. It's timely, it's tragic, and when the film trusts those two to carry a scene, it's compelling stuff.

The Cold War backdrop is handled with genuine affection. There's a real effort to build a world of sleek suits, retro gadgetry and spy-movie swagger, and for stretches it works beautifully. You can feel the filmmakers wanting to make something grown-up and stylish, something that sits alongside the great political thrillers of the era it's set in rather than just borrowing the wallpaper.

But here's the thing: the film can't quite hold it together. The tone lurches all over the place, swinging from serious character drama to campy spectacle in ways that feel less like deliberate contrast and more like a lack of confidence. One minute you're watching something that feels genuinely important, the next you're sitting through action sequences that look like they belong in a mid-budget video game rather than a tentpole blockbuster trying to kick-start a franchise.

And then there's the casting. January Jones as Emma Frost is a real problem. She's stiff, cold in the wrong way, and so underwritten that she ends up functioning as expensive set dressing. Her powers appear and disappear according to whatever the scene requires, and there's no sense of who this woman actually is beyond a vague air of icy menace. The supporting mutants, Havok, Banshee, a handful of others, feel like they've been assembled to fill out a roster rather than because the story needs them. They don't deepen anything. They crowd it.

What's frustrating is that when the film narrows its focus, particularly around Beast and Mystique's arcs, there are clever, character-driven moments that hint at something richer. But the script keeps pulling back out to service the bigger machine, and the intimate story gets lost inside the spectacle.

I stuck with this run of films, for better and worse. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) does considerably more with some of the same ingredients, and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), well, that's a conversation for another day. But First Class sits in an odd middle ground, better than the franchise low points, not good enough to be the fresh start it clearly wanted to be.

Two and a half stars, comfortably. Ambitious, occasionally brilliant, and carried by two lead performances that deserve a tighter film around them. McAvoy and Fassbender give it everything. The film, frustratingly, doesn't quite meet them halfway. It's alright. That's the most honest thing I can say about it. Not bad, not brilliant, just a franchise still working out what it wants to be.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2011  | Watched: 2025-09-24

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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