Review of The New Mutants (2020) by Thequietgamer — 30 Aug 2020

Okay Hollywood, no more superhero-horror movie hybrids. You had The Crow. You had the first Hellboy. You even had Blade 1 and 2. Unfortunately, every other attempt you've made at marrying these two genres together has proven to be pretty disastrous, and this latest effort is no exception.

To be fair, The New Mutants does have a GREAT premise. Take a bunch of teenagers struggling with the unfortunate consequences of their newly awoken powers, lock them in a psychiatric facility with a doctor operating under the guise of wanting to "help them," and then give one of them the ability to literally bring all of their fears to life. It's an borderline brilliant idea, but the execution is so awful that only occasional and very brief flashes of the excellence that otherwise could have been ever show through. The lead actress can't act, its most interesting character (Magik) is underdeveloped, and the way it transitions from serious moments to ones where the cast are behaving like you would expect a bunch of horny, damaged pubescents to out of nowhere leads to a lack of tonal cohesion between a lot of the scenes. It has all the right elements to be the perfect millennial/Gen Z cape-and-costume flick, but never gives any of them enough room to breathe causing to whole thing to feel more like a janky pilot for another inevitably disappointing CW show rather than a well-executed proof of concept.

Case in point, these teens have some of the coolest powers I've seen in a comic book adaptation since Bloodshot, but they don't really get to use them outside of the admittedly exciting final battle. Each character is compelling and seemingly layered in their own unique ways, but aren't explored much beyond the surface level. The plot also ultimately ends up going nowhere as it saves the major developments and inevitable showdown with the real big baddies for a sequel that we now know doesn't have a chance of getting made. I enjoyed this movie the most when it was trying to scare me. It's actually quite effectively creepy at certain points. Things like the smiley face men made my skin crawl showing that Josh Boone could have some potential as a horror filmmaker should he decide to go further in that direction at some point in the future. Which makes his upcoming remake of Stephen King's The Stand have some appeal to me whereas it otherwise didn't. However, given how strongly Magik's backstory ties into this side of things it only makes the fact that they sidelined it all the more frustrating.

Like Spawn, Venom, and so many others before it, the final entry in Fox's X-Men universe is a misfire. Largely because it squanders so many of its most promising aspects more than anything. I can't think of another film I've seen that fails to capitalize on or sometimes even recognize its greatest strengths in the same way this one does. Which made me walk out of that theater feeling like I had seen where things could have gone right and ultimately disappointed with what we got instead.