NOT X-ACTLY A GREAT EFFORT
Franchise’s new film shaping up to be worst-reviewed X-Men ever
There is a moment in the 1980sset film X-Men: Apocalypse when teenage mutants are exiting a screening of the then new Star Wars release Return of the Jedi. One of them notes that the third film in any trilogy is “always the worst.” The line registers like a direct dig at the widely derided X-Men: The Last Stand, the third film in the earlier iteration of the X-Men franchise.
Yet while Apocalypse director and co-writer Bryan Singer might be meta-heckling Brett Ratner’s 2006 movie, let’s hope he’s also aware enough to be self-deprecating there: Critics say his own Apocalypse — yes, the third film in this X-Men prequel trilogy — is even worse.
Critics have deemed the latest X-film so mediocre that it currently ranks below Ratner’s The Last Stand, which has a score of 58 per cent on Metacritic. Singer’s Apocalypse now sits at a Metascore of 51.
So where does X-Men: Apocalypse fit in among similar flicks this year? If early reviews are to be believed, it’s not as controversial as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it doesn’t measure up to Captain America: Civil War either.
The reviews may be decidedly mixed, but the critical reception registers as more disappointing because it suffers by comparison, landing right on the heels of the mostly lauded Civil War. The reviews also bear particularly disheartening news when you consider that every prior superhero film directed and/or written by Singer had received a “positive” aggregate score on Metacritic.
Barring an 11th-hour surge in positive reviews, Apocalypse will be the worst-reviewed X-team film ever — ahead of only the solo instalment X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Metascore: 40), the 2009 movie that was so misguided, it stitched Deadpool’s lips together (thus silencing the very snark that helped make this year’s Deadpool such a huge hit).
So just where does this film — and Singer’s former sure-handed conducting — go off the rails?
A phalanx of critics say the world-domination plot seems awfully tired in 2016, particularly because for the third time this year in a major superhero film, the crimefighters are pressed into battle against each other on a massive scale. (And for comparison’s sake: Bv S has a Metascore of 44, and Civil War a 75.)
“Both Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse are superhero extravaganzas with severe traffic control problems, but while the former keeps things flowing reasonably smoothly, the latter film ... resembles a bumper-car nightmare,” writes the Hollywood Reporter, which adds: “Mostly it just feels like a bloated if ambitious attempt to shuffle as many mutants and specially gifted characters as possible into a story of a resurrected god ready to take over the world.”
The “traffic-control problem” crops up again and again in Apocalypse reviews, some of which note that numerous superhero films now groan beneath this weight of ever-growing casts as a means to elevating expectations.
“Apocalypse feels like a confused, kitchen-sink mess with a half dozen too many characters, a villain (played by Oscar Isaac) who amounts to a big blue nothing, and a narrative that’s so choppy and poorly cut together that it feels like you’re watching a flip book instead of a movie,” writes Entertainment Weekly.
And Variety writes: “Although the X-Men ensembles are usually large, there are simply too many characters for the action-heavy Apocalypse to properly juggle.”
Movie Nation critic Roger Moore, in lambasting the film, finds structural issues doomed by formula: “The epic effects, titanic struggles timed out every 30 minutes or so and ever-growing, ever-evolving lineup of characters of Apocalypse … underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. So many movies, so many mutants, with filmmakers straining to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying. They’re joyless technical exercises, as predictable as a video game.”