In a summer that already featured comic-book tentpole movies Thor, Captain America and The Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class kind of flew under the radar. I think this speaks to just how much Brett Ratner’s stinkbomb of a third installment tarnished the image of this once-proud franchise. The fact that Ratner managed to completely screw up the iconic Dark Phoenix saga still angers me to no end. Yet, somehow, I had more faith in this film than all of the aforementioned superhero flicks.
I liked what I heard of the road this movie took to getting made. Bryan Singer was back on board as a producer, and he was exploring a back story he had in mind while making the first two X-Men movies which, at the time, were the standard of how to make comic book-based films. Matthew Vaughn, fresh off another movie of the same genre and one of my favorite movies of 2010, Kick-Ass, was brought on to direct. The casting choices, I felt, were inspired, particularly with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender playing younger versions of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Professor X and Magneto. The bottom line was, they were taking chances in trying to revive a franchise that had flatlined with X3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
The Most Beautiful Fraud 