Kevin Bacon and January Jones play a Nazi doctor and villainess Emma Frost, who battle the X-Men. (AP)
It’s 1962, World War III is ready to roll and someone comments incredulously, “You’re sending in a bunch of untried, unauthorized freaks.” No, not the 1962 Mets — the “X-Men: First Class” are here to polish their superheroism, stop the Cuban missile crisis and do a lot of ring-a-ding-dinging in cocktail lounges attended by splendid girls in abbreviated lingerie. Between the superpowers, there is a lot of Austin Powers.
This sure-footed, nimbly executed origins story gallops along nicely for more than two fast-paced hours that begin during the Holocaust, when, at age 12, everyone’s favorite future Jewish superhero, Erik Lehnsherr, learns to bend metal as a Nazi doctor cheers him on (and shoots his mother). Erik (who will later take the name Magneto) is played as an adult by that proven Nazi hunter Michael Fassbender of “Inglourious Basterds,” but Herr Doktor Sebastian Shaw is, alas, Kevin Bacon. Good actor, but more mellow than Mengele. Not the guy I’d choose to play a swastika’d psycho.
As we move to 1962, grown-up Erik vows revenge, tracking Shaw to the Nazi bedroom community known as Argentina. Meanwhile, in America, mind-reader Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) befriends a blue-skinned mutant named Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), then uses his knowledge of mutant DNA exactly the way you or I would: To pick up hotties.
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Cut to Las Vegas, where a CIA spy (Rose Byrne) infiltrates a club where the dress code for the ladies is: Leave your dress at home. There, she discovers that a US colonel is being pressured into supporting the placement of missiles in Turkey, a move that will cause the Soviets to retaliate with a launching pad in Cuba.
Shaw is behind all this, and I think Kevin Bacon was in this scene somewhere along with a devil dude who looks like Darth Maul. But in truth I didn’t notice much except January Jones in skimpy, snow-white underthings as Emma Frost, a villainess who can play mind games or even turn (not unsexily) her skin into diamonds. This is a step up from her work on “Mad Men,” where she merely acted like a block of wood.
Shaw, who enjoys the ability to suck up power from whatever he’s touching — even a nuclear warhead — and turn it to his advantage, wants to start World War III. Because, um, after the people are dead, all-powerful supermutants like him will be extra especially in charge. Of whatever crumbling cinder is left. Even though humans are already about as much of a threat to this guy as hamsters. Also, the whole Turkey-Cuba drama is a bit overthought, isn’t it? The guy could just march into the White House and take over. Somebody give this guy Gen. Zod’s phone number.
The villain tools around in a nuclear submarine decorated like a cocktail lounge in which he exercises his right to super-sexism. Drinking a whiskey, Shaw says, “This needs ice” to Emma, who obligingly pops up to the surface to scrape a couple of cubes off the polar ice cap.
Pursuing him at the behest of the CIA, which has set up a transmitter gadget inside a giant golf ball that proves the EPCOT center has classified uses, Charles Xavier meets Erik and the two launch a nationwide talent search for recruits, bringing in characters we’ve already met, plus some new ones.
One, Havok, can do a sort of laser-powered hula hoop he can use like a flame thrower. There is also a lone black guy whose nickname, Darwin, implies more durability than he’s got. For all of this series’ chatter about civil rights and equal treatment for minorities, its casting action isn’t very affirmative.
Director Matthew Vaughn, who did last year’s delightful “Kick-Ass,” doesn’t do witty this time around (a couple of gags about Charles losing his hair, and the line “X-ceptional!” are about it for humor), but he does keep up a spiffing pace while making the action blaze.
A large and talented cast manages to make more than a dozen characters pop, but still this is the Michael Fassbender show. He was a wonder as Bobby Sands in “Hunger” and showed huge charisma in “Basterds.” Now he’s where Christian Bale was about six years ago, a fresh, silky menace ready to fill any helmet or fire any weapon you’ve got.
Erik/Magneto’s rage at the Nazis, his class envy when he spots the Camelot-sized pile in Westchester County where Charles grew up and his (correct) sense that the US military is no friend to the mutants give the show so much juice that there’s no need for the heavy political allegory of earlier episodes. Exception: when Raven says, “We are different, but we shouldn’t try to fit into society. Society should be more like us — mutant and proud.” Excuse me, but I think someone’s been to too many Lady Gaga concerts.