I dug the hell out of this movie.
*SPOILER ALERT*
But I'm really getting tired of the anticlimactic evil-archetype-dies-unspectacularly write offs in Hollywood movies.
Without going further into it, there was potential (given what happens near the climax) to have a tremendous battle to the death between the Hellfire Club and the X-Men, but they decided to use the human military aspect as the second climax, and that took away the attetion of Bacon's character and what he was about to accomplish. IDK... All that rising action just to be kind of deflated the way it happened, albeit regardless of how cool the villain's death scene was, is kind of aggravating.
The two cameo's in the movie were great. One I had spoiled for me, and the other I knew nothing about, so I did get a bit of a surprise.
"Go fuck yourself."
The best usage of the F-word to achieve a PG-13 rating in a while.
Stryker's age in the film kind of worries me as this film does have ties to the second X-Men movie and so on, so maybe the old Stryker in this film is William Stryker's father? He is billed as William Stryker ",Sr." so where does that leave the Brian Cox "William Stryker" of X2? He is billed only as William Stryker with no surname.
Also, the numerable "familiar face" character actors were really cool to see on screen and sharing in some cameo time, as well.
There were some solid memorable lines, the most memorable is "Let's just say I'm Frankenstein's monster... and I'm looking for my maker."
There were some things, deaths in particular, that I felt were rushed(Darwin and Shaw) and some things for the sake of continuity(Azazel teleporting the team away from the island without receiving instructions where to actually teleport to) that I take issue with, but the fact of the matter is this movie is very cool, took a lot of unrelated things and mashed them together pretty cohesively(Beast creating the Blackbird and the suits the X-Men wear).
Also, not mentioning Riptide's name(The guy that created tornado's) seemed to me to be a tremendous oversight by the director and writers of the screenplay. I've haven't seen many movies that don't offer some mention of a characters name, and if they remained nameless it was usually at least mentioned in the story.
*SPOILER ALERT OFF*
I will say this before I give my rating; I believe this was as good as the first two X-Men films, the second being the best of all three. You can barely see the effects of a rushed production and budget cuts, but Vaughn masked it subtly without leaving big mistakes on screen.
8/10
