Mostly Spoiler-free X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the third Marvel super-hero movie of the spring (just had to bring that up.  That's insane), and the fifth movie in the current X-Men series of movies (nope, First Class was not a reboot).  It also marks the return on Bryan Singer to the director chair, who has not directed one of these since the amazing X2.  So, with how well Captain America: The Winter Soldier was received, coupled with Singer's return, Days had a lot to live up.  And, for the most part, it did.

X-Men movies always have a chance of falling into a trap of introducing too many random characters.  This happened badly in The Last Stand and to a lesser extent in First Class.  Days does a good job of focusing on the characters we know already, so there's very little exposition going on here.  Sure, we get a handful of newbies in the future battles with the Sentinels (I was pumped to see Bishop's big screen debut), but they prove to ultimately be window dressing.  It's nice to have a super hero movie where we are immediately thrown into the fray, and get right down to business.

Without getting to much into the plot, the crux of the story involves a little butterfly effect fun where Logan's consciousness is sent into the past to change the course of history and stop the future from ever happening.  So we actually spend most of our time in the 70's, following around Logan and the First Class versions of Prof X, Magneto, Mystique, & Beast, as well as the lone major newcomer, Quicksilver.  I thoroughly enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique - she got a much bigger role this time around (shocker), and she nailed it (shocker).  McAvoy is fine as Xavier though I have to admit he's not my favorite.  He does that stupid pained face constantly and, yes, he's constantly touching his temple.  The real shocker was Quicksilver.  I loved his character.  He's clearly comic relief, but he's a lot of fun to have around.

We also got a lot of Peter Dinklage as the defacto human "villain," Dr. Trask.  I found it refreshing that him being a little person had nothing to do with the role.  In fact, there's a solid shot you'll forget he is a little person at some point - it's never mentioned once.  As for his performance, I was slightly underwhelmed as he was rather one-note.  I can't help but compare him to Tyrion, and considering what he's going through on Game of Thrones, it's tough to look at this performance as anything but pedestrian.

I'm not going to go too much into the conclusion other than it was overall a satisfying experience.  The inevitable final battles were tense, but not dragged out in excess.  And yes, they do end up doing the expected parallel final battle a la The Matrix, with action both in the 70's and the future.  Both are well done and have some pretty amazing setpieces I won't go into, as where is the fun in that?  I would like to go a little bit into the denouement, but I feel it's a bit too spoilery.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie.  The 131 minutes moved briskly, there was plenty of solid action, and we didn't have to deal with any boring X-Men for too long.  On a personal note, the X-Men Age of Apocalypse lore is one of my favorites, so I figured it'd bias me unfairly.  Overall, it really didn't, as we spend far more time in the past then in the desolate future.  Looks like if you're going to one "summer" blockbuster this Memorial Day weekend, you'd be best to go to this one.

Grade: B+