Matthew Vaughn entered the world of comic books last year with the R rated, ridiculously violent Kick-Ass. So it wasn’t hard for me to get on board when I heard he was coming to take the X-Men franchise out of the deep murky waters it pushed itself into after X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine came out. Both films offered us nothing more than questionable action sequences that made you wonder whether the summer blockbuster formula had been broken.

Thankfully though Vaughn decided to return the franchise to its roots and bring it to its true origins of when Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender) became friends and decided to form this school for gifted children.

It’s obvious that when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were sitting down and writing the original story their intention was to tell a story of how anyone who’s been ostracised from society for external or social deformities lived. Eventually what these people do is that they want acceptance. There’s two ways of gaining this acceptance, you can either: do it by adapting yourselves to conform yourselves to society (i.e. Professor Xavier’s approach); or you can demand that they accept you because you’re a person just like them and deserve the same rights that they’re afforded (i.e. Erik/Magneto’s approach).

What I’ve always liked about the X-Men property when it  comes to adapting it is that at this point it’s pretty much free-form. There’re many story arcs that anyone can come and decide to tell, but when it comes down to it there’re so many characters to pick and chose from that’ve been good, evil and anything in between. So it’s the sandbox that any screenwriter would be happy to bring his shovel and bucket to play in. While I’m sure that there’re some inconsistencies in the story from the original beginnings of the X-Men I think those sit secondary to how enjoyable the film turns out.

This movie had everything you’d expect from a Vaughn comic book movie. Tons of really fun action sequences, a great antagonist and enough fun little character moments to make you want to come back for more. I don’t know what it is about him but Kevin Bacon is just always great as that aloof antagonist. He’s basically playing the role of Magneto, the idealist who believes he’s better than the humans and just wants to profit as much from it as he can before he eventually emerges as the new world power.

Where I had a problem with this movie was towards its ending. The film didn’t quite decide it was a stand-alone story separate and apart from the already established film franchise, but at the same time I had walked in hoping this would do for X-Men what Batman Begins did for Batman. However, when the end of the film came around I came to the realization that the film pretty much failed to want to truly deviate from the franchise by shoe-horning in a bunch of standard tropes that the franchise has had from the beginning. While it’s not the fault of anyone involved, it definitely was a minor disappointment that I had.

Rating: 8.0/10