Review: The New Mutants

Teenager Blu Hunt plays the lone survivor of an attack on her Native American family by some kind of fantastical creature. She’s institutionalised and put in the care of Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga) who specialises in youngsters with seemingly mutant powers/abilities. She and the other patients are forced to band together when they start being stalked by creatures playing into their deepest, darkest fears. Anya Taylor-Joy and a Scottish-accented Maisie Williams play two of the other patients.

 

I’m all for freshening up a genre/subgenre, but this 2020 “X-Men” spin-off ain’t it, chief. Dreary, deeply unpleasant, and incredibly slow-paced it just doesn’t come off. Director Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”) and his co-writer Knate Lee seem to be going for a mixture of “Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” which is…uh, pretty different I guess for this type of thing (though “Glass” did touch on some of this sort of stuff in its weakest scenes). It doesn’t work at all though, and it’s the polar opposite to how to make a comic book/superhero film in my view. Even taking COVID into consideration, it’s not hard to see why this one (which was actually filmed in 2018, I might add) kinda flopped and died. Anya Taylor-Joy is sorta interesting, the film isn’t.

 

“Game of Thrones” actress Maisie Williams mumbles so much of her dialogue and whispers the rest of it that I could barely understand anything she says (It was never a problem in “Game of Thrones” and I’m quite used to Scottish accents like the one she affects here). The normally terrific Alice Braga is strangely flat and boring. Even when the film finally starts to introduce some comic book action in the last act it’s really dumb. A giant bear for a villain? Ugh. It kinda plays like a comic book film made by people who don’t like the genre, leaving you wondering why they bothered and why you should care.

 

Gloomy, glum, lethargic and rather creepy. A real mess, it’s the worst “X-Men” film to date and the worst comic book film since 2005’s “Man-Thing”.

 

Rating: D

 

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