I’ve experienced a roller coaster of emotions when it comes to the X-Men franchise. X-Men was a good first film for a franchise. I went into it not expecting much and I came away liking the film. That led to pretty high hopes for the second film. X-2 blew me out of the H20. I saw it five times in the theater and it quickly became one of my favorite super hero movies. That led to extremely high hopes for the third film. I left X-Men 3: The Last Stand angry. That film fell way short of my expectations. From there they produced the pathetic spin off Wolverine. That all leads to the prequel X-Men First Class.

I wasn’t all that excited about this film…until…until Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 92% approval. Just to put it into perspective X-Men got 82%, X-2 got 88%, Last Stand got 57%, and Wolverine got 37%. Rotten tomatoes is pretty accurate on whether or not a movie is going to stink. So a friend at work tells me that X-Men First Class got 92%. That’s crazy. With the percentage that high I got immediately excited about the movie. So excited that I went to a midnight showing.

X-Men First Class is a decent film. It’s a pretty good story and a decent attempt to get back to the goodness that was X-Men 1 & 2. The movie was a little slow and I got a little tired. One other problem is that the film doesn’t have any of the cool X-Men. When you have mutants like Banshee you need to up the action to make up for your lack of coolness. They didn’t. First Class is a decent attempt at getting the franchise back on track but it’s still a far cry from X-2.

X-Men First Class is rated PG-13 for some girls in their underwear, an F-bomb, and some action violence. I give it one thumb up.

Rob’s Rating System =
Two Thumbs Up – A great movie worth paying full price.
One Thumb Up – A decent attempt and worth seeing at a matinee price.
Thumb to the side – An ok film, but wait for video.
Thumb down – A stinker of a film. Don’t waste you life seeing it.