Review: The New Mutants
The New Mutants, directed by Josh Boone, tells the tale of a young Native American girl named Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) who ends up being the soul survivor of a deadly attack on her reservation. When she reawakens, Dani finds herself under the care of Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga) who works for a mysterious employer researching Dani’s newfound mutant powers. Together alongside other fellow young mutants, which include a shy Irish(?) girl who can turn into a wolf (Maisie Williams), a Kentucky kid with a dark past (Charlie Heaton), a literal hothead (Henry Zaga), and a spunky sassy Russian girl who can rip the very fabric of space and time itself (Anna Taylor-Joy), Dani and friends discover something dark and sinister is afoot in this objectively unsettling hospital.
The New Mutants is the final X-Men film from the studio formally known as 20th Century Fox, and it was a film that was meant to come out two years ago. This film went through quite the post-production hell to get here, with reshoots planned to make the film more scary based on initial reactions to the film’s slick trailer back in 2018, only for those reshoots to never happen once Disney acquired Fox, nailing the coffin shut on a potential new franchise in the X-Men universe. After being delayed multiple times, the film finally arrives to theaters during literally the worst time to watch a movie in theaters.
Dear god this movie can’t take a break, although after finally getting the chance to watch this movie I can see why Disney pretty much dumped it here now. This film tried to be the best of many worlds being a horror teenage superhero movie, and in the end it ended up being the worst of all of them. Director Josh Boone, who also directed 2014’s The Fault in Our Stars, tried so hard to appease conventional fans of the X-Men by making a fun, action-packed superhero movie while at the same time trying to make the X-Men horror film he so desperately wanted to make from the very beginning. Sadly, he fails at both fronts as not only was the film a drag, it also wasn’t remotely scary in any sense.
The characters are all tired stereotypes of the dozens of cliched high school characters we’ve seen in dozens of films involving teenagers. Wolfsbane is the shy girl who befriends the unpopular girl, Magik is the snooty popular girl who’s also a bully, Sunspot is the clueless hotty (only in this case he’s literally hot), Dr. Reyes is the overbearing strict teacher character, the list goes on. The performances were either hit or miss, with the young cast doing their best given a laughably bad screenplay and the adults being downright awful actors.
The horror aspect of this film is quite the enigma; there’s an over-reliance of music in each scene that’s suppose to be creepy, yet at the same time there’s not a single jump-scare to be had in this film at all. It’s literally the worst of both worlds when it comes to horror movies. The superhero aspect of the film was basically non-existent, as a lot of the action sequences happened off-screen, especially during the film’s climax. The action is a joke, the editing’s all over the place, and the CGI was an eyesore.
Overall this was a bad movie, and knowing that this cut of the film was the original cut that they had two years ago I don’t understand why they took THIS long to release it. The reshoots that were suppose to happen never happened even before the Fox-Disney merger, so why put this dull, unoriginal movie though all the trouble of post-production hell in the first place? Whether it’s Boone’s sheer loss of interest in this film that doomed it or Disney ending the X-Men franchise in favor of a inevitable reboot in the MCU, we’ll never really know. What we do know, however, is that this movie was a dud that officially ends Fox’s X-Men franchise not with a bang, but with a shrug.
Final Verdict: 3/10