Our own Chris Corbellini returns from jaunts west (and Midwest) to tackle the first non-saurian blockbuster of the summer. Please welcome him back. Chris Corbellini! YAAAAY!

X-Men: Days of Future Past

*** (out of four)

by Chris Corbellini

Huge Ackman: Wolverine is buff.

So this one grew on me.  Perhaps in the bleak future, when some of X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST takes place, our only choices on the big screen will be 5-6 comic book franchises and their sequels and prequels, and James Bond. And our only hope of being entertained is if a world-class director is put in charge of those pulpy stories, and comes up with an innovate take.  “The same, but different,” the late screenwriter Blake Snyder recalled an agent telling him.  And here we are, with director Bryan Singer, who helmed the first two X-MEN movies, returning to this tent-pole feature and adding electricity to a time-tested comic book premise, time travel itself.

Life is tough. Wear a helmet.

A confession: I read and collected graphic novels in the 1980s, and despite those roots I’m very close to being done with superhero flicks. I’m tired of them. I nearly walked out of the first Andrew Garfield SPIDER MAN, which would have been a first for me since ISHTAR. It was capably made, but it was also roughly 60 percent of the same origin story as Tobey Maguire’s version. The recycling felt like a scam, as if some unseen Hollywood executive in a darkened suite lit up a Cuban, chortled, and shouted, “See! Ha! These suckers will buy anything in superhero spandex!”

As this latest X-MEN unspooled — in unnecessary 3-D because there were not a lot of cheaper, 2-D showtimes available — I started to get the same vibe. A “Let’s make this a superhero All-Star Game, squeezing in characters old and new,” method of storytelling, complete with an apocalypse, some fire-breathing androids, and a TERMINATOR 2, let’s-go-back-in-time plan to execute the scientist responsible for all of it (Peter Dinklage, who hopefully built a ski cabin for himself with the money).

I debated an early departure. And then Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” happened.

In 3-D or otherwise, the audience is then privy to the POV of a warp-speed mutant as he rescues the 1973 versions of Dr. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in the Pentagon. It’s Singer’s stamp on the picture — a moment where as scripted it says The mutant rescues our heroes from the armed homo sapiens with his god-like reflexes, but the filmmaker puts some oomph into it, gleefully pointing out this mutated Usain Bolt can divert bullets by flicking them with his fingers before the rest of the room or the bullets know what happened.

Yes, but how many marshmallows can she catch in her mouth?

You see “the stamp” from time to time in other superhero movies. Sam Raimi couldn’t help but  return to his Evil Dead roots here  in SPIDERMAN 2, for example. And in this case the “Time in a Bottle” moment really jump-starts the movie around the start of the second act, and rolls downhill to a better-than-expected finish.

The most impressive part of X-MEN to that point was the work done off-screen by a personal trainer on Jackman, who was 45 when the movie was filmed but is sculpted like a weightlifter 20 years younger. In costumes from two different eras, Jackman has this role down cold at this point. It’s perhaps the best work he has done for this series, and this sequel nails home that despite his bad-ass nature and war-tested skills, Jackman’s Wolverine is small potatoes, power-wise, compared to almost all of the other mutants, and way out of his depth for his assignment that drives the movie.

Wolverine has claws and heals quickly. But can he lift RFK Stadium and drop it near the White House? No chance, and while he’s chosen to go back in time and enlist Dr. X and Magneto to help prevent the shape-shifting mutant Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from murdering the Dinklage character and setting in motion the events that lead to the apocalypse, he’s actually more a voice of reason on the sidelines rather than a lethal weapon here.

Lawrence, a vision in blue from head to toe with yellow, expressive eyes, has more to do in this one than in her previous X-MEN film, and it’s the right choice. After an Oscar win and two Hunger Games installments, she’s as confident (and lithe) as any young actress that’s ever been cast in a popcorn movie. On the flip side, someone had to lose some face time as a result, and while Halle Berry was once Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive, and an Oscar winner herself, she has perhaps five lines in the entire film.  Berry’s character Storm fights the oncoming robot horde, called The Sentinels, in that apocalyptic future, along with the aged Dr. X (Patrick Stewart, still a perfect casting choice) and Magneto (Ian McKellen, ditto).

Confused? You might be if you’ve never read the comics or watched any of the previous films, but the final showdown is staged/edited spectacularly for mass consumption — really two battles at once being waged 50 years apart, man versus mutant, mutant versus man-created monsters — and it has a few life-or-death moments. The end result sets a new timeline for the franchise, and basically deletes director Brett Ratner’s X-MEN story (the third film) from existence. I’m unfamiliar with comic book production at this point, but in the 80s I remember each mainstay Marvel series (X-Men, Avengers, Spiderman, Daredevil) used to produce a one-off “annual” issue -– generally larger in scale, not beholden to any recent storyline, and frankly, better than any average issue that year.

Ex-Men…starring Renee Richards.

It was a chance for the storytellers involved to let it rip and not feel locked into beloved characters staying alive or staying dead, and in this case Singer’s X-MEN felt like the franchise’s annual issue. I couldn’t give this one three and a half stars or more, only because I don’t think it’ll hold up well in 10 years when the special effects will seem dated. This is the bane of all comic book pictures, except for perhaps the one that starred Bane, and used the human spirit to inspire rather than a green screen.

These superdude films have truly become a director’s medium. They are the headliners. We have six STAR WARS films, and reportedly three more on the way. But hey, J.J. Abrams is directing. Look what he did for the STAR TREK franchise (which has 12 movies, and counting), right? James Bond is over 50 years old now, but hey, Oscar winner Sam Mendes is still on board as director, and perhaps they’ll land Christopher Nolan next, who re-imagined BATMAN, a franchise that has eight movies so far, with another in development. With SUPERMAN, naturally.

(Editor’s Note: As CC and I discussed recently, these films are not made so much for the tastes of American audiences but for purposes of selling overseas. The international box office, as well as home-viewing, is where the real dollars are made. Messrs. Abrams, Mendes and Nolan are doing the directors’ version of  “For a good time, make it Santori time” here.)

Just a thought: maybe we should send Lawrence back in time in her scuba-tight blue outfit to take down the creatives responsible for this current comic book movie craze. Oh wait, that won’t work. The original flick in this franchise started the craziness in 2000, and if she sabotaged that one, wouldn’t her character cease to exist? You see how complicated it gets. Lawrence has two more HUNGER GAMES movies left. And judging from the domestic take of this X-MEN, another will be on its way, hopefully with as much verve and imagination. We can hope for the future.