Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

ennifer Lawrence as Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past. AP

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director: Bryan Singer

Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen

Four stars

The original X-Men director Bryan Singer returns to the franchise that rescued the superhero genre from the campy, Day-Glo nightmare of Batman & Robin by showing that films based on comic books could be genuinely dramatic, intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, as well as action-packed and fun.

With X-Men: Days of Future Past, he has given fans the boldest and most ambitious entry so far. Newcomers could find themselves occasionally feeling lost among the in-jokes and allusions to previous instalments. But even if you don't know Blink from Beast, nor fully grasp the roots of the love-hate bromance between Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, there is enough spectacle, invention and incident to keep even casual viewers hooked until the film's eye-popping climax.

Really, that should be climaxes, because Days takes place simultaneously on two interconnected temporal fronts.

One is a near-future dystopia in which some of the old guard from earlier X-Men films, including Patrick Stewart as Charles, Ian McKellen as Erik and Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine, are among the last survivors in a genocidal war being waged against mutants by killer robots called Sentinels.

The other is 1973: the year to which Wolverine is returned in order for him to stop blue-skinned shape-shifter Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) assassinating the machines' creator, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). To do this, he must unite the younger Charles (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender), who, following a split at the end of Matthew Vaughn's nimble X-Men: First Class, are at their most antagonistic. First, though, Wolverine has to convince the disillusioned Charles to kick a serum that dampens his telepathic powers, and break Erik out of a glass-ceilinged cell beneath the ­Pentagon.

The latter sequence, featuring Quicksilver (played with smirky charm by American Horror Story's Evan Peters), who moves so fast that he sees the world in slow motion, is the film's standout set-piece. That the character disappears immediately afterwards, however, is one of its biggest ­disappointments.

Jackman's Wolverine, on the other hand, goes from strength to strength. He only had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in First Class, but here, surprisingly, plays mentor and mediator, bridging the gap between past and future and, if he's successful, the one between Charles and Erik. The latter's relationship is complicated by their feelings for Lawrence's chameleonic mutant, whom they pull between her Raven and Mystique identities, respectively.

Like Vaughan's installment, Singer's film makes good narrative use of the social and political climate of its setting. Where Future took place against the Cuban Missile Crisis, Days is haunted by the horrific loss of life during the Vietnam War and America's defeat. Portentousness and bombast occasionally intrude, while the time-travel element becomes increasingly confusing (even McKellen has admitted that he doesn't understand what is going on). Even so, this is superior genre fare, and cleverly (cynically, some might say) clears the way for any number of new X-Men ­adventures.