The New Mutants - Review Thread

The New Mutants(11/26/2020) 
It’s hard to look at The New Mutants, a long delayed X-Men spinoff, without thinking about the endless struggles it had getting released. It would take way too long to recount it all but the long story short is that they were going to be delayed by reshoots until they were then delayed by Disney’s acquisition of Fox and then delayed again by COVID until they were finally unceremoniously dumped into theaters in the middle of the pandemic and no one in their right minds were interested in risking their health to see it. Clearly no one had any confidence in it at the studio and all the while the entire community of people who paid attention to entertainment news had turned the movie into something of a laughing stock. Honestly by about the second delay I was kind of rooting for the damn thing; it would have been an awesome turnaround if the thing finally showed up and proved to be this misunderstood project that was actually good the whole time. That did not turn out to be the case but the movie also isn’t quite the entertaining trainwreck that certain people were hoping for either. Instead it’s a kind of mediocre experiment in trying to use the X-Men franchise in a different direction that’s largely competently made but lacks any particular spark of inspiration or memorability and the film was probably hurt by the delays more than anything because one of its biggest sins is that it’s coming a few years too later for a handful of trends it’s trying to fit in.

The film was directed by a guy named Josh Boone, whose biggest credit prior was directing the Gen Z weepie The Fault in Our Stars and you can kind of tell that with this story about teenage mutants rebelling against the oppressive company trapping them in a school that he’s kind of trying to ride that post-Hunger Games wave of “teenagers vs. dystopias” YA adaptations but that whole trend was kind of already on its way out when this was supposed to come out in 2018 and it feels even more out of date in 2020. The plan was reportedly to re-tool this to focus more on the film’s horror elements, though it’s unclear how much of that re-tooling actually happened. You can see those elements here as well, and while they’re not bad I’m not sure that even the most cowardly of audiences would actually find the movie “scary” which is more of a failing if you view it as a horror movie and less of a failing if you view it as a YA thing. There are some other elements here that are a bit mixed as well. I liked the film’s young cast more than I didn’t; the film’s star Blu Hunt is a decent presence and it’s also cool to see Maisie Williams here but Anya Taylor-Joy is hampered here by some rather questionable writing Charlie Heaton is doing some rather poor accent work. Looked at purely as a comic book superhero movie in the X-Men franchise the movie doesn’t really impress a whole lot, its special effects are clearly budget and the film’s action finale is rather poor.

Really I think a lot about it would have generally made more sense as a pilot for a TV series rather than as a film trying to launch a film sub-franchise. In that context its relative lack of quality action would have computed a bit more and its rather cursory probing of the characters’ personalities would have felt a bit more promising. As a feature it’s just not good enough. But despite that I think there is room for some perspective here. Without the X-men tie-in I suspect the film’s various release problems would have been less high profile and looked at more as a routine YA flick its issues would have felt more like a routine bit of Hollywood under-achievement than as a hot mess. On the other hand without the X-men tie-in I probably never would have been interested to see it in the first place so that cuts both ways. Also, when looked at on its own unique terms this probably isn’t even the worst movie in the X-Men franchise. It doesn’t stumble nearly as ludicrously as the infamous X-Men Origins: Wolverine and it has more of a vision than the soulless X-Men: The Last Stand. Hell I’d say it might even be in the same ballpark as other entries that disappointed like X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix and both of those movies had a lot more in terms of resources to work with. So, for all its challenges the movie isn’t really the embarrassment Disney seems to think it is. It’s not very good, but it also isn’t actively bad, and with expectations where they are that’s more than I could have asked for.
**1/2 out of Five