X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

The time travel logic does not survive ten seconds of scrutiny, and it barely matters. What Singer builds instead is a 1973 political thriller with mutants in it: Nixon on tape, a Paris peace conference, a Pentagon break in staged around Evan Peters' Quicksilver moving through a kitchen while Jim Croce plays, still the single best use of a superpower in the series. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy do the heavy lifting. McAvoy's Xavier is a wreck on drugs, slurring at Logan about how he traded his powers to keep his sanity, and the scene where he speaks with his older self is the only moment in these films where the mythology earns actual feeling.

Peter Dinklage plays Trask small and reasonable, which is far more frightening than a cackle. The future scenes are the weak half: Blink, Bishop and Warpath are props with abilities rather than characters, and the endless siege cuts back to them whenever the 1973 story needs padding. Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique is written as a plot lever, a trigger to be pulled or not, and the film keeps telling us she has a choice while giving her almost nothing to play.