REVIEW OF X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

year: 2014 rating; **

Following CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, Marvel continues with the Political Thriller template, and in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, none other than Richard Nixon is in cahoots with a greedy entrepreneur who plans to exterminate mutants by using robotic war machines… 

That’s President Richard Milhouse Nixon, the current Commander-in-Chief as it’s 1973 since Wolverine was sent back to the past so that Mystique, also known as Raven, doesn’t get captured by authorities which would result in… well let’s just say there's no more X-MEN if he doesn’t set things straight...

And of course Logan's not alone, providing the last entry, FIRST CLASS, to coincide with the original lineup – although FUTURE PAST is more of that movie’s sequel with Hugh Jackman serving as special guest star. Meanwhile the likes of veteran members Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halley Berry are wasted on a subplot dealing with some kind of purgatory dimension resembling the THOR universe: The best scenes are also the funniest, mostly having to do with Wolverine's '70s culture shock and slacker mutant Peter aka Quicksilver and his penchant for not only speeding past everyone else, but perceiving them in the same wry, sarcastic manner Wolverine did in the original film, also directed by Bryan Singer which, to give due credit, started the Marvel monopoly in the first place. And those were indeed the great old days...

For now, in the midst of an otherwise promising time travel espionage, one excruciatingly overlong sequence involving Xavier in his virtual reality brain-machine, trying to coax Raven from assassinating a mutant-hating businessman (the only real villain on board), deletes potential as the characters waste so much verbal energy explaining and/or pontificating past and future events, nothing very suspenseful occurs in the meantime.