X-Men: First Class and the fleeting glimpses of Fassbender as Bond

I don't really know what to think of Matthew Vaughn's brisk and reckless X-Men: First Class, but I know that the film promised to me by so many as not only an expert comic-book origin story, but a terrific mainstream action film altogether were being ever so generous. 
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Which isn't to say that I hated the film, because I enjoyed watching this cast (specifically Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy) and its pseudo-James Bond Cold War globe-trotting too much to store up any genuine disdain. No, I suppose my reluctance has to do more with the X-Men franchise as whole which, even at its height in the early aughts, never quite did it for me.

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First off, there are just too many characters in these films, way too many. First Class introduces a whole new slate of recruits, none of whom are relatively interesting in either their unique ability/power/mutation or sloppy characterization. (Here's Zoe Kravitz as a betraying butterfly woman...)
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On the whole, though, I just think this mutant self-acceptance stuff is, if not horribly misguided, than rather tedious. The entire mid-section of First Class is this "it's hard out here for a mutant" stuff and I just have trouble buying it. 
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I know there are parallels with gay and civil rights (certainly with the film's Cold War-era inception), but when a good portion of your film involves secondary characters pouting about how their powers (which, I might say, I would trade my listless existence for in a second) are this crippling social boundary - I mean, get over it, Mystique.
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There's just so much stuff going on here, and only so few elements work, that the whole thing ends up coming off as overcrowded. I wanted it to just focus on Magneto's revenge-and-betrayal, but anytime the film moves on from its two stars, it wavers too badly to recommend. [C+]