Just got back, and I loved it. Definitely my favorite of the franchise thus far, and my 2nd favorite CBM of the year.
I did have some issues with the parallel timelines and so-forth, but that's always gonna happen when you're dealing with time-shifting plots. Still, it served as a great reset button for the series, and the performances, particularly from Lawrence and McAvoy were great. I felt like this installment was sorely needed to reconcile the past Mystique we met in XM:FC with the older one we knew from earlier films, and Lawrence and the screenplay did a fantastic job of doing that.
Special shout-out to Peter Dinklage who I felt made what could have been a mustache-twirling villain feel like a real person with conviction. I
believed him when he said he admired the mutants and thought they were the key to a new age of peace for mankind, even if his logic behind that belief was seriously...flawed, lol.
As with all of Singer's X-films, I found the action to be good-but-not-spectacular, though as with the White House sequence in X2, he continues to find fun ways of demonstrating certain mutants powers like in the Quicksilver sequence for example. And speaking of Quicksilver, while I loved his whole sequence in the film, I really wished they'd found a way to bring him back in the end. His entrance felt to me like the introduction of a fun new dynamic within the group and then...he's gone from the rest of the film (aside from a shot of him watching TV). Made him feel more like a plot device than he should have been, imo.
Anyhoo, that's a minor quibble, and tbh, minor quibbles are all I have with this flick. I think it's extremely impressive that this franchise has had its best outing to date 7-installments in. I mean, how rare is that? Can't wait for Apocalypse. 8.5/10.
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