4) X-Men: Days of Future Past
This is one of those movies that baffled me. Somehow, it’s amassed critical praise across the board (including from We Got This Covered’s own Dominic Mill, who gave it four stars), so much so that it has been widely hailed as the best installment in the X-Men franchise since X2 – if not simply the best. I couldn’t disagree more. Outside of the awesome Quicksilver scene, X-Men: Days of Future Past was, for me, up there with X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a prime example of how not to make a comic-book movie.
Don’t tell me that I was too stupid to “get it” or that I missed the point of Days of Future Past – I understood it fine, and it just didn’t grab me. The time-travel shenanigans worked to scuttle any attempt at continuity the series had managed beforehand, and the plot took up so much space that all the fine actors involved appeared like insects completely encased in amber, unable to move, let alone act. Part of what made X-Men: First Class such a joy is that it put characters first. X-Men: Days of Future Past sees fit to strand every player with tiny amounts of development and pile on the special effects in hopes that no one will notice something’s amiss. Well, I did. Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Hoult – the list of great actors who have nothing to do but run around angrily and vomit exposition is long.
Comic-book movies, especially about figures misunderstood by society like the X-Men, need heart – otherwise it’s just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. X-Men: Days of Future Past feels to me like the least personal entry in the franchise to date. It’s so focused on its sprawling story and fan service that it forgets to populate itself with actual characters. As a result, it’s a soulless, borderline-incoherent mess – an X-Men movie sorely lacking what we might as well call the X-factor.
– Isaac Feldberg
