Combining the original X-Men series and the recent First Class reboot, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) finds himself sent back in time to 1973 to prevent the assassination of Dr. Boliver Trask (Peter Dinklage) as that will lead to a very dark future for mutant kind but Magneto (Michael Fassbender) may make this hard to complete.
Days of Future Past along with Captain America: The Winter Soldier have been my 2 most anticipated films for 2014 after Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, I also really loved the first 2 X-Men films director Bryan Singer made before (he also directs this new film) as well as 2011's First Class which excellently rebooted the series, does this new film stand up to those heights?
Well no it doesn't but that's not to say in any way at all that this is a bad film as it most certainly is not, this is a very good film and there are multiple reasons for that, the first is that the film expertly combines the cast members from the original films with the key cast members from First Class and all of them for the most part deliver the goods, it's so great to see Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen sharing the screen again as their chemistry is so good to watch as is also the case with James McAvoy and Fassbender, Hugh Jackman (Australia's Ace Rimmer) is good as Logan once again, Dinklage is very good also as Dr. Trask though while Evan Peters as Quicksilver almost runs away with the movie all on his own.
The film also has some very impressive action sequences that I felt were better but not by much than the action in the Winter Soldier mainly because the action felt big, it feels very coherent to watch and most important of all I actually cared about the people in it whereas the action in Winter Soldier felt very Bang! Crash! Boom! at times plus the fighting here feels like it has a real impact on the characters whereas in the Winter Soldier they go through the gauntlet and part of you just thinks "This is nice action but I don't care all that much."
The film is not perfect however and the reasons for this are as follows:
- The first is that I didn't really care for the female performers this time, Lawrence is a strong and compelling actress as she's proven in the Hunger Games and American Hustle but here she just seemed to be in neutral and at times she shows a little bit of disinterest in the role, of no doubt she's done this film in between other huge projects and was just exhausted by this point, hopefully after she has a nice vacation she'll be back to her best form.
The other part of this is the near absence of Rogue (Anna Paquin) from the film, here was a major character in the first 2 films and here she's nowhere to be seen and she should've been in the future world scenes as she could've very easily been added there without impacting on the script too much and if anything might have enhanced the future world battles but oh well these things happen.
- The second part is that I left film wanting more, now technically this isn't a bad thing but I would've been more than happy to have had this film run 20-25 minutes longer as at 132 minutes the film does cram in too much into a tight running time and that extra length would've allowed me to spend more time in that dark future world which I would've loved to have seen more of.
But with those fairly minor quibbles out of the way, Days of Future Past is my favorite blockbuster so far this year and I very highly recommend it, 4 out of 5.
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