WHY IT’S UNLUCKY NO. 13 FOR THE X-MEN MUTANTS
WHAT a long time it took to get here. This is the 13th X-Men outing, originally slated for release two years ago. But a studio sell-off and the pandemic halted these young new mutants’ plans. Heaven knows how they’ll fare in their Leaving Certs!
We’re in a hospital-prison combo, a suitably spooky abandoned building repurposed for guarding and treating ‘new mutants’: superheroes, with a variety of dangerous growing pains, like Dani.
After her dad has been despatched by a demon bear tornado (stay with me), Dani wakes to find herself trapped in this facility and, even worse, surrounded by a standard school-drama array of archetypes. They fight but ultimately end up getting off with each other in pools and graveyards. The Doctor guarding (or maybe controlling) them doesn’t instil much confidence: ‘I come from a family of doctors. My mother was a vet.’
Game Of Thrones’ Maisie Williams plays a frumpy wee Scottish girl who has a habit of turning into a wolf. Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) gives us a misunderstood country boy who reeks of narcotics, again. Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma) is reduced to complicated Russian and doesn’t move much beyond it.
And Blu Hunt, as our chief protagonist and most troublesome mutant Dani, makes her celluloid debut with almost no discernible enthusiasm or charisma. In fact, The New Mutants feels like a Disney Channel TV movie from the early 2000s in its scripting and performances, with comfortingly predictable individual story arcs and plodding dialogue.
Dani is both under threat and the source of all the mutants’ eventual misery, but none of this tension is communicated in any way that you can feel, sitting in a freshly fumigated cinema.
Her dad dies. I felt nothing. A giant demon bear of her own magical creation rampages through the hospital. Nothing.
If you’ve already ploughed through a dozen of these, this latest might tickle your fancy. But for non-committal passers-by of the franchise, it’s probably not worth leaving your house for.