Before The Avengers took over, The X-Men pretty much invented the superhero movie as a team sport. Their position in the league has slipped since Iron Man and co. But this one shows the X-Men still play a good mental game, one more suited for grown-ups who like their superpowered characters rubbing up against history and the real world, rather than just using it as a battlefield.
It's certainly a good X-Men movie, one which franchise fans should find satisfying. However, watching this without having first seen 2011's prequel, X-Men: First Class, may well do your head in with its duplicate characters and double-tracked timeline.
The director of this Bryan Singer started it all off with the fine first X-Men in 2000. His X-Men 2 wasn't bad either. But part three, X-Men: Last Stand felt like way too many players had been let on to the pitch.
The two Wolverine offshoots have been patchy. But the aforementioned excellent First Class took the team back to its 1960s Cold War origins and told of how the young Mutants and got their first leather jumpsuits - and how Professor X and Magneto fell out and became the Gandhi and Genghis Khan of the growing Mutant conflict with humankind.
It was fun and thrilling, though it did have a pretty ropy ending involving the Cuban Missile crisis. Here it's mucking about with history again. The assassination of JFK figures briefly, then the action heads to the Vietnam War, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and goes on to make a mess of Nixon's White House.
