*This contains tons of spoilers*

Yesterday, seeing as it was Orange Wednesday, me and Mirel decided we would check out Xmen: First Class.  I enjoyed the original films and the general feedback from critics seemed to be good, so I was looking forward to this.

We get to the cinema and reserve our premium seats (these seats cost an extra couple of quid but you get extra leg room and decent back support) but we get there to find a couple of bastards sitting in our seats.  Every week you some cheap mofo who can’t find the will to pay extra for a premium seat and yet decides to sit there anyway.  Thankfully they moved after Mirel told them to shove it, and hopefully one-day they will suffer a slow and painful death.

Sadly just before the film started a family sat near me, all eating popcorn.  I don’t understand why cinemas sell loud crunchy food, but it really pisses me off.  One day I will run a cinema, no kids allowed, and we will only sell yoghurt.

Anyway so the film starts, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Kevin Bacon in the film.  I hadn’t seen any previews so had no idea he would be in this.  I thought he played the evil badguy role perfectly, though at the end when he is kind of frozen still, he is pulling quite a funny face.  When I find a screenshot I’ll post it up.

I was pleasantly surprised by James McAvoy (who I thought was American but is actually Scottish, maybe I should have paid attention to his second name).  I thought in Wanted he was a bit of an emo kid, but here he plays Xavier to perfection as a highly confident guy with a cool English accent.  Michael Fassbender plays Magneto, and to be honest I’d never heard of him before, but he was amazing.  I wanted to see more of him, when he was on his own and trying to get revenge before he became magneto.  If there is a sequel I’m worried that all I’m going to see him is him wear that stupid helmet whilst giving orders to his minions.  Seeing McAvoy and Fassbender on-screen together were the highlights of the film for me, even when they played chess talking to each other it was always intriguing to watch.

But with the lesser mutants, I didn’t really have the same enthusiasm.  The kids who get recruited half-way through the film were in my opinion quite lame.  You had some guy who looked like the ginger guy from Harry Potter who made weird high-pitched noises, and Beast who looked more like a cuddly toy, or one of those pilots from the Nintendo Starfox games.

But the worst character for me was Angel Salvadore, the stripper with wings.  I can’t really blame the actress that played her, I’m just going to say that the character is one of the lamest I’ve ever seen.  Also halfway through the film, one of the young X-Men gets killed off, and its easy to say that they killed off the wrong one (plus its strange for the token black guy to get killed off so early).

Azazel (the red guy who could transport anywhere) was also disappointing.  When I first got a glimpse of him at the beginning I thought he looked quite cool, but then for the rest of the film all he did was jump around from place to place, there was nothing else to him at all.

Too be honest I would rather see X-Men as a TV series.  The first season of Heroes showed that we are all intrigued about watching people discover their powers and how they deal with them, and having X-Men rather than Heroes would be very interesting.  Plus we would get more talking and less of those lame action sequences, which they felt inclined to throw into this movie just because it’s a movie.

For me the first-half of the film was stronger than the second half.  Seeing the Harry Potter guy fly around and having the stripper with wings chasing him shooting gunk out of her mouth was quite awful.  I really did think I was watching some cheap 70s film.  It just didn’t work for me.

Sadly Rose Byrne couldn’t really do much with her character, she played the lame CIA agent who hung out with the X-Men but didn’t have any powers.  It’s like a guy with a small penis hanging out with a bunch of porn-stars so it really was quite an uphill task for her.

I’m guessing that in the sequel they’ll show how some of the other mutants joined the X-Men, such as Jean Gray and Storm.  Wouldn’t it be great if Storm and Riptide (the guy who could cause hurricanes) have an epic weather battle?  I don’t know if it’s in the comics but it would be damn cool.

As Mirel pointed out to me, you’ll probably need to have seen the original trilogy to have enjoyed this film.  I was waiting near the end for the all the dots to connect, and alot of them did.  I know I’ve posted quite a few negative opinions of this film, but it’s honestly a fun film to watch.  If you don’t like X-Men then it’s worth seeing just for McAvoy and Fassbender, and there are plenty of funny and sad moments to keep your emotions from going stale.

Director Matthew Vaughn (who I’m proud to say is English!), has come up with another strong film on his impressive CV, and even though this doesn’t quite feel as polished as Kick-Ass,  I hope he is on board for the sequel.