The New Mutants (2020) 20th Century/Action-Sci-Fi-Horror RT: 94 minutes Rated PG-13 (violent content, some disturbing/bloody images, some strong language, thematic elements, suggestive material) Director: Josh Boone Screenplay: Josh Boone and Knate Lee Music: Mark Snow Cinematography: Peter Deming Release date: August 28, 2020 (US) Cast: Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, Henry Zaga, Adam Beach. Box Office: $23.9M (US)/$49.2M (World)
Rating: *
NOTE TO READERS: Due to COVID-19, I haven’t set foot inside a movie theater in nearly eight months. Although theaters started reopening in August, health concerns have prevented me from resuming my normal moviegoing activities. I’m in the “high risk” category. I plan to start reviewing new titles as they become available for at-home viewing (either Blu-Ray or digital streaming). I can’t promise I’ll get to all of them, but we’ll see how it goes.
If the X-Men series stumbled with last year’s Dark Phoenix, it falls flat on its face with The New Mutants. It is the 13th and final entry in the series. As you all know, it has a troubled production history that was further hampered by Disney’s acquisition of Fox in March ’19. There were issues between director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) and the studio over the tone of the movie. There were extensive rewrites, reshoots, recuts and delayed release dates. It sat on the shelf for more than two years before seeing the inside of theaters this past August. All signs point to The New Mutants being a stinker and it is.
PLOT? WHAT PLOT? There really isn’t much in the way of plot in The New Mutants. A teenage Native American girl named Dani (Hunt, Another Life) ends up in a hospital after surviving the destruction of her reservation by a powerful something. The facility is run by Dr. Reyes (Braga, Predators). She informs Dani she’s a mutant and must learn to control her abilities before she can be released. There are four other mutant teens- Rahne (Williams, Game of Thrones), Illyana (Joy, Glass), Sam (Heaton, Stranger Things) and Bobby (Zaga, the upcoming TV miniseries The Stand). Nobody can leave because of the unbreakable force field surrounding the property.
For a while, The New Mutants plays out like a medley of The Breakfast Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Notice I didn’t mention any X-Men titles? It’s because it doesn’t feel like an X-Men movie at all. That is, aside from a few quick references and some brief clips from Logan. After about an hour of teen BS like Illyana constantly bullying Dani, the kids band together and fight to escape from the facility and some bad CGI monsters. It took the teens all this time to realize what we all knew from the start. Altogether now, peeps! REYES IS BAD! She claims they’re being considered for future recruitment by the X-Men. IT’S A LIE! SPOILER ALERT! She’s really training them to be killers for the sinister Essex Corporation. Excuse me if I don’t express shock or surprise.
The New Mutants is the worst “superhero movie” since 2015’s Fantastic Four. I’m not even sure it qualifies as one. If anything, it’s a horror movie albeit one without scares and thrills or blood and gore. It’s dark, dull, bleak, depressing, muddled and idiotic. Maybe it’s just me, but I had only a vague notion of the teen mutants’ powers. I saw what they could do and the traumatic events that brought them to be where they are, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I was seeing. All I could see was a bunch of morose kids stuck in an old building with a watchful authority figure and each other. We subjected to an hour of non-activity before things start going haywire with Reyes making her true nature known to her charges. Here’s the paradox. During that time, the writers introduce a completely unnecessary subplot about a romance between Dani and Rahne. I don’t object to the nature of this relationship; I question why it’s included in the first place. Sure, I get that it’s Rahne’s primary motivation to take mutant action when Dani is threatened. Other than that, this story thread goes nowhere.
While I’m sure the post-production tampering is mainly to blame for the mess The New Mutants became, I doubt ANY version of it would be any good. Let me sum it up for you. IT’S A FREAKING BORE! It doesn’t know what it wants to be and ends up being neither an exciting superhero adventure nor a scary horror story. The acting is generally pretty bad with one notable exception. Williams does a decent job as Rahne, a sad girl with a tragic background that includes being rejected by her own people as a witch after it’s learned what she can do. I would have liked to have seen this better developed. Joy, sporting a shaky Russian accent, isn’t exactly terrible, but we all know she’s capable of more than she gives here.
I already said the CGI is bad. The smiling monsters and the “Demon Bear” in the finale are clearly computer creations. The big climactic battle looks no different than the average video game. This is what we were waiting for? What a bust! The nicest thing I can say about The New Mutants is that it’s short. It brings the X-Men franchise crashing down in only 94 minutes. Although it had a good run (20 YEARS!), the team deserves to go out on a higher note than this.
