Both Oars In A first class failure

Jun 10, 2011

There are several wonderful things about the onset of summer. School ends, pools open, and barbecue grills come out of the garage. Days lengthen and people spend more time outside. Personally, I also appreciate the green light to wear light colored pants after Memorial Day, the social summer solstice. This eliminates having to juggle two wardrobes when I travel between Haiti and the Northeast.

But, what I like best about the opening of summer is the cavalcade of blockbuster movies that Hollywood releases. After the post-Christmas cinematic dry spell, there is nothing better than taking in a good action movie to get the blood moving and shake off the doldrums of winter.

Unfortunately, my first attempt to rev-up for the season with a big screen action movie turned out to be a miserable failure. “X-men: First Class” seemed like a safe choice. Wow! It was terrible. It pushed my seasonal clock back so far I actually hibernated during the movie.

There is no reason to give a spoiler alert for what follows because the new X-Men prequel is so bad that it spoils itself faster than any review could. There are only two actors who deliver quality performances: Oliver Platt and Hugh Jackman. Unfortunately, Jackman makes only a cameo appearance and Platt is on screen for less than three minutes. The rest of the actors seem to be taking their first acting class and not doing too well.

While the movie is meritorious for arguing against all forms of bigotry, current handlers of the franchise go too far when they exploit Stan Lee’s anti-discrimination message for the endorsement of homosexuality as normative. This is especially troubling in a PG-13 movie promoted as a family action film that also has Raven throwing herself at every man that comes across her path. If there is a subtext, it shouts moral bankruptcy — not empowerment.

Artistically, this ideologically driven theme, a mutation itself, is so clumsily conveyed by random, unexplained furtive looks between characters that one feels like an intruder who just walked into a room uninvited — not a moviegoer. After one such inexplicable interaction between Havoc and Darwin, the whole audience in the theater where I saw the film audibly gasped as if to say jointly, “What?! Did we miss something?”

In terms of moral ambiguity, there is also a troubling scene involving the young Raven, aka Mystique. Raven is a mutant with blue, textured skin and chameleon-like powers that allow her to take on the look and shape of any human she sees. At the beginning of the film, she is inexplicably shown naked as an adolescent in the kitchen of Xavier’s childhood castle-sized home.

Yes, in reality, she is in a blue body suit; but, nonetheless, she, in effect, appears in a full frontal nude state as a pre-teen mutant. I bet I am not the only parent of an eleven year old girl who will find that extremely uncomfortable.

Another random creep-out in the film is Havok’s use of naked female mannequins for target practice. There is also the notable fact that Darwin, the only African-American mutant, dies first. Despite his superpower of adapting readily, ergo his name, he was unable to assimilate a flaming ball of power inserted in his mouth. It is rare to get undertones of misogyny and flashbacks to slavery, or at least the violent racism of the past, in an otherwise simple comic book movie. It is also alarming.

Adding to the mixed social messages, the movie also contains an imbecilic re-imagining of history. The Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the more dramatic moments of international brinksmanship, is reduced in the movie to being a mere game of mind control by a former Nazi doctor played by Kevin Bacon, and the good Dr. Xavier, emerging leader of the X-men. This is such an idiotic farce even for a comic book movie that I half suspect that Putin paid for its insertion in the movie in an attempt to improve Russia’s image.

In the end, “X-men: First Class” fails to honor its magnificent comic book origins and detracts from the quality of the movie franchise created by the previous X-Men movies. Simply put, it is a first class failure. See something else to start your summer — I wish I had.