This is a question that’s been rattling around in my head since I first saw Logan: is it actually the best X-Man movie? The franchise was at the forefront of the “Superhero Boom” at the turn of the century, and in the decade and a half since then has produced some of the genre’s best and most iconic outings. Even if it is the best Wolverine movie — something that I think goes without saying — its competition within the larger X-franchise is still particularly fierce.
5. X2: X-Men United — Although the original X-Men still holds up shockingly well by even today’s standards, keep it just outside of reach. From the embarrassing black leather costumes to a young Hugh Jackman who is shockingly doughy compared to his later appearances, it just never quite clicked the way that the later movies did. And although the casting — which included Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and, yes, newcomer Hugh Jackman — was pitch perfect, the principle cast was surprisingly small for a franchise known for such expansive roster of unique characters.
Everything that X-Men did, however, X2 did better. The principle team of five mutants grew to include Nightcrawler, Ice Man and Pyro. And while Magneto and Mystique were still frenemies with Xavier & Co, we also got antagonists William Stryker, Jason Stryker and Lady Deathstrike. The story was more ambitious, the special effects more competent and the fight scenes — especially that opening sequence with Nightcrawler in the White House — were vastly superior.
4. X-Men: First Class — After the disaster that was X-Men United, it took Fox a while to find its footing again. It followed up the already legendarily bad third movie with the somehow even worse X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It didn’t produce a good follow-up to X2 until nearly a decade later, but it was well worth the wait.
First Class, a prequel to the franchise thus-far, did what not even the good X-Men movies before it could pull off: it was fun. They re-imagined the franchise as a super-powered Bond movie, with a much younger and more outrageous cast of characters, and colorful (if uniform) costumes to brighten up the pallet. The direction was vibrant, the action infectious and everyone — even Xavier — was a blast to watch. They even managed to salvage some of Wolverine’s battered image with a brilliant cameo in the funniest scene of the franchise outside of…
3. Deadpool — The first X-title after the timeline got rebooted in Days of Future Past, there was a lot of speculation surrounding this movie. It was the first R-rated film in the franchise, the first to not feature Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and the first to be predominantly a comedy. They even kept the same actor who played Deadpool in the disasters X-Men Origins: a movie that just about everybody would rather forget. Simply put, nobody knew how people would take to this dramatic departure from everything that had made up the X-Men movies before it.
As it turns out, when given the space — not to mention the rating — to be the character he was designed to be from the beginning, Deadpool was as much a fan-favorite on the big screen as he has proven to be on the page. Despite a notably stretched budget, Deadpool was one of the best action movies of the year, not to mention the funniest movie this side of The Nice Guys. It proved that superhero movies didn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all commodity and acted as a proof-of-concept for…
2. Logan — While repeated viewings might eventually prove this to be in the wrong spot on this list, I have to go with my gut on this. It turns out that the perfect movie for a single character within a franchise noted for its expansive teams of wildly diverse heroes simply isn’t the perfect movie for that larger franchise. And while I would be shocked if there’s another movie from 2017 that I end up liking better, I simply can’t bring myself to put this at the front of this list.
Along with Deadpool, it proves that there is room among the blockbuster superhero movies that dominant today’s box office for harder-edged movies: with smaller budgets, more intimate stories, smaller casts and, yes, more graphic violence. It was the perfect send-off for a franchise that has defined the way an entire generation views the X-Men, for whom Patrick Stewart is Charles Xavier and Hugh Jackman is Wolverine.
1. X-Men: Days of Future Past — When push comes to shove, Days of Future Past is the best movie in this franchise. It even holds its own against other heavy-hitters of the genre like The Avengers and The Dark Knight. While comic purists will hate how they took another perfectly good team narrative — never mind one headline by franchise favorite heroine Kitty Pryde — and shoved Wolverine in as the lead, it was a fitting alteration in the context of the X-Men films.
It is without question the most ambitious film in the franchise to date, set simultaneously in two distinct time periods, with two generations of X-Men and focusing on two parallel narratives. It is as much about Wolverine trying to save the day as it is about Xavier and Magneto coming to terms with the years they lost to fighting among themselves. It’s as much a fight for the future for Mutantkind as it is for justice in the immediate present. It’s as focused on young Charles’ fight against rage and addiction as it is on Mystique’s struggle against her own mercenary nature. It is everything I ever wanted in an X-Men film, and it pulls it off so effortlessly as to make you wonder why it took seven movies and fourteen years to finally get it right.
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