'X-Men: Days of Future Past' Review: A Time-Traveling Good Time

Time travel movies are a delicate business. There are inevitable plot holes, so it really comes down to how many there are and how easy they are to ignore.

In the case of "X-Men: Days of Future Past," the answer is...pretty easy.

The movie acts as a sequel to both the awful "X-Men: The Last Stand" and the much better "X-Men: First Class." Most of the main cast members from both movies reprise their roles here, playing younger and older versions of their mutant characters.

The plot, based on the 1980's era story arc in the comics, starts us off in a future in which most of the human and mutant race has been wiped out, and the remaining X-Men are on the run from Sentinels, giant adaptible machines designed specifically to kill mutants.

In an effort to change their present situation, the surviving X-Men decide to send Wolverine into the past to stop a key event from happening and beginning the production of the Sentinels. Many action scenes ensue.

Everything that happens in this movie happens efficiently and with a good degree of excitement: There's always a ticking clock, which is impressive considering that we have two different timelines, happening simultaneously in a sense, that both need to have an emotional investment for the audience.

Because of the pace, we don't spend much time questioning the mechanics of the premise. But if that's the sort of thing that you pay attention to, "Days of Future Past" might bother you a bit. There's practically no explanation as to exactly how this time travel is possible at all, and a major character's powers seem to have been tweaked to allow it.

However, we're constantly chasing the next objective and/or watching some really excellently done action scenes in the future timeline, so fortunately there isn't a lot of time to think too hard about things. That's good, considering how many convenient yet implausible things happen.

A good effort is made to continue the odd sort of love quadrangle that started in "First Class" between Jennifer Lawrence's Raven/Mystique and Michael Fassbender's Erik/Magneto, James McAvoy's Charles/Professor X, and Nicholas Hoult's Hank/Beast. This provides the emotional core of the film, but it's swallowed a bit by the other happenings of the story. Don't go in expecting a strong emotional core, or much if any co-screen-time between real-life couple Hoult and Lawrence.

You get the sense, upon walking out of "X-Men: Days of Future Past," that it mostly exists to repair the damage to the franchise done by "Last Stand" and to put the "First Class" cast in the same universe. It accomplishes that feat, and manages to be plenty entertaining along the way.

Ultimately, hardcore fans who read the original "Days of Future Past" might be disappointed to see the stark differences in the details of the story. However, the rest of audiences will likely enjoy the movie plenty, especially if they were fans of "First Class."

We give "X-Men: Days of Future Past" 8 Wolverine claws out of 10.

Oh, and if you decide to go, stick around through the credits for an end-credits scene!