I still have nightmarish flashbacks to my last X-Men experience. I was unemployed and I decided to run some errands. In my foolish enthusiasm to get out of the house, I slammed the door shut without checking to see if I had my keys. I didn’t.

In order to kill time before my wife came home, I decided to go and see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Fuck me, it was a horrible experience. It was like some deranged monkey had been put in charge of the production and had spent $150 million throwing fecal matter at the screen. I vowed never to watch another X-Men film.

Not that I thought another film would come any time soon. I thought that Wolverine hadn’t made any money and that X-Men would be left alone for a while. But apparently lots of sad, lonely husbands also got locked out of their apartments during that time and went to see that colossal skidmark.

X-Men: First Class didn’t really appear on my radar. When the film came out, I could only think of my cat dragging his dirty bum across the tile floor in the kitchen. The insolent look of disobedience; the furry backside dragging mournfully across the surface with the hind legs terrifyingly immobile; the horrible brown streak circling the dinner table - 20th Century Fox were going to push this on us no matter what; even if the poo on Hugh Jackman’s face hadn’t had time to dry yet.

One of my wife’s little quirks is that she wishes she could deport me and marry James McAvoy instead. With this in mind, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to get away with not watching First Class.

The first thing that struck me when watching the film: it’s actually quite good. Sure it’s a little odd to hear Kevin Bacon speaking pretty good German, but it had a strong start.

The movie begins with a young Erik (who’ll later become Magneto) being separated from his parents in a Nazi concentration camp. Distraught, he manages to bend some metal gates with the power of his mind. Seizing on this, Dr Schmidt (Bacon), later to be called Sebastian Shaw, tries to get the kid to move a coin for him. The kid tries and tries, but he’s unable to move it - the coin stays stubbornly motionless. Feeling that the kid perhaps needs a little more motivation, he brings the child’s mother into the room. Schmidt says that the boy has until the count of three to move the coin or he’ll shoot the boy’s mother. Erik tries even harder but he still can’t do it. True to his word, upon the count of three, Schmidt shoots Erik’s mother dead. Finally the boy is able to move the coin - his powers are fuelled by his rage.

What surprised me about this scene is just how grim it is. There’s an incredible amount of tension and the violence is shockingly strong for a PG-13. It’s nice to see a comic book movie that doesn’t hold back.

Better is yet to come. Erik, now grown up and played by the omnipresent Michael Fassbender, decides to track down Dr Schmidt so that he can avenge the death of his mother. Here the film becomes something of a Bond movie. Erik slowly draws closer to Schmidt/Shaw and assassinates anyone who gets in the way. There’s a fabulous scene where Erik uses his powers to kill a couple of ex Nazis who are hiding in Argentina. At one point he uses his magnetic powers to pin a man’s hand to a table with a knife. He doesn’t even have to touch the blade.

What makes this even more enjoyable is the over-the-top music that plays. When Erik’s in 007 mode, he has this brilliant piece of theme music that accompanies him. It’s kind of like a mixture of the James Bond theme and the rattling guitar piece from Once Upon a Time in the West. It gives the character a level of cool that far exceeds anything in the previous X-Men movies.

Once Erik meets up with Charles Xavier (James MacAvoy) the movie becomes a little less fun. It’s still leagues ahead of anything else in the X-Men franchise, but the movie can’t quite maintain the heights of the opening thirty minutes.

One of First Class’s major problems is that the supporting characters are universally dull. The mutant kids that Xavier tracks down are fairly appalling and every time they’re on the screen, the film drags. None of the kids have got any serious acting chops and all of their special skills are underwhelming. There’s a kid who can fire raw bolts of energy, another has wings like a fairy, another can scream at such a pitch that he can fly at supersonic speeds and there’s even a boffin with prehensile feet. There’s also a kid called Darwin, who can adapt to any situation - at one point he sticks his head in a tank of water and develops gills. But the character’s only purpose in the film is to die. He’s the sacrificial lamb to prove how ruthless Sebastian Shaw is - Shaw fires raw energy into the kid’s mouth and the kid croaks.

What makes this scene so risible, though, is that Darwin is one of the only black characters (the other is a stripper). At one point Shaw even makes a speech about slavery and the camera stops right on the black kid. Subtle, no? But of course, the kid is black and therefore he must die.

The most ridiculous part of the film occurs in the final battle between the X-Men and Sebastian Shaw’s Hellfire Club. A large portion of the battle is given to a fight between the evil fairy stripper and the kid who can go supersonic by screaming. The fairy can apparently shoot stuff out of her mouth, which frequently gives us the completely idiotic image of a stripper fairy shooting crap out of her mouth as a spotty kid with flying squirrel wings screams in order to reach supersonic speeds. It’s the worst action scene I’ve seen in years - it’s completely risible.

Thankfully, cut into this nonsense, is the final confrontation between Magneto and Sebastian Shaw. If the film had focused on this entirely, it would have had a much stronger final act. I particularly liked the cold, methodical way that Magneto kills Shaw - with Shaw paralysed by Professor X’s mind control, Magneto, using his powers, slowly moves a coin towards his head. It’s the same coin that Shaw tried to get a young Erik to move when he killed his mother. The coin slowly floats towards Shaw’s head and then enters it, eventually passing through the other side. The younger Erik would have had this coin go through Shaw like a bullet, but the older, wiser and more ruthless Erik takes his time so that he can enjoy Shaw’s death.

One strange thing about the ending of the film is that Michael Fassbender, having now become Magneto, starts talking in a thick Irish accent. Throughout the rest of the film his accent is fairly neutral. Was this the first day of shooting or is he unable to shout in anything but his native brogue?

And the final shot ensures that the film ends with a damp squib. We finally see Magneto in his full costume. Only the costume looks like he knocked it up at home and his helmet has silly little horns on it. After such a strong beginning and such a shaky final section, First Class was begging for a strong ending. Sadly it doesn’t get it. I couldn’t help but feel they dropped the ball with this one.

Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.