X Marks the spot
X-Men: Days of Future Past4 stars (out of 5)
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Michael Fassbender, Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage
Directed by: Bryan Singer
Running time: 131 minutes
The latest X-Men movie offers much in the way of escapist pleasure, but experiencing Bryan Singer's new time-bending spectacle of Marvel mutants also touches a sad note, if only because Jim Croce will never get a chance to see it.
The best scene in the 131-minute cataclysmic saga of genetically powered weaponry is scored to Time in a Bottle, Croce's final No. 1 single released in November 1973, one month after his death.
It's just one of Singer's clever uses of period style and sound that provide an extra dimension, beyond 3-D visuals, capable of delivering a larger, deeper, emotional experience by offering context to the endless, chaotic action.
The director gets a chance to revisit his own boyhood via a plot that sends Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to 1973. His task is to stop a weapon of mass destruction from being invented by preventing an interaction between Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and the scientist (Peter Dinklage) planning the next apocalypse.
If this all sounds a little over the top, imagine a scene where young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) pulls up the steel superstructure of a stadium and puts it over the White House like a toilet seat.
Everything in this movie is supersized, yet for all the inherent silliness and the occasional fake metal helmet, it finds success on the human scale in every scene.
Even with a sprawling cast that includes two generations of actors playing the same roles, Singer ensures every moment in this two-hour-plus X-travaganza has a reason for being on screen.
Even the Croce number, Singer's little stroke of filmmaking genius, has an important narrative purpose - to free Magneto from a prison cell after he was implicated in the murder of JFK.
That the scene takes place in a commercial kitchen, and also conjures memories of RFK's assassination, is no accident. It's just another one of those extra layers Singer brings to the mix that give this movie enough tensile strength to suspend our disbelief for the duration. We want to know if Mystique can be redeemed from villainy before she goes bad. And thanks to Lawrence's naked acting talents, we don't even care that she looks like the love child of a Smurf and a BeDazzler machine.
Not even Professor X (James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart), the man with the most powerful brain on Earth, can resolve the unknowns. He tries hard, doubling his efforts in two different eras - with the two actors making the dual-pronged trip entirely believable.
Fans will be looking for the waypoints, and the writers saw them coming, staying true to the overall timeline. But the real victory is that even people who are not established fans of mutant superheroes will find an entry point into the movie through its humour, its heart and its humanity - the most compelling X-factors of all.
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