The New Mutants Review

The New Mutants has had a long, rocky road from its inception to its eventual premiere. While I was initially quite excited from its original trailer, the hype eventually waned as years passed, the franchise it was a part of ended, and the entire movie theater industry shut down for months at a time. Now, it's finally out, and I was beginning to anticipate that all of the delays, re-edits and changes The New Mutants had gone through would result in a product that could never hope to live up to the hype that three years creates.

For the most part, this is exactly the film that we got. The New Mutants starts off in a a rocky place and never really rises from it. The cinematography tries too hard to set a horror tone, overshooting dark and moody and landing in muddled territory, making it hard to focus on basically anything that's happening. The dialogue is forced and corny, and not in a fun B-movie way that you would expect from an X-Men themed horror film. The pacing is all over the place, and the constant shifting between YA teen drama, X-Men action and psychological horror results in a messy film that never seems to know what it is or what it wants to be.

The biggest problem with The New Mutants though is that the stakes never feel legitimate. Everything bad that happens is mostly either a loud jump scare or a reveal that's explained to the audience rather than shown, losing all impact it could have had - if it would have any at all, considering most of the film's twists can be seen coming from a mile away. In fact, it almost doesn't seem like the film is trying to hide anything; the creepy psychological horror is explained through a simple juxtaposition of shots right away that show you exactly what the cause of it is, removing almost all stakes and reducing the story to simply waiting for the clueless characters to figure out what you, the audience, already knows. There are some decently creepy potential monsters - one in particular being a strange, uncanilly lanky figure wearing a smiley face mask - that seem like they might get some scares at first, but are then drowned out when you know immediately that they aren't real and probably won't be able to hurt anyone. That, and the longer they stay on screen, the more you focus on their bad CGI.

I can't say this movie is excruciating to sit through because there are some scenes here and there that almost come around to being okay, and the characters almost have enough depth to be interesting, but there's so many ideas bouncing around that all of them are essentially rendered moot. The facility the characters are trapped in at first feels like a metaphor for conversion therapy, then it's a generic mental hospital, then its a secret government research lab, the emotions go from horror to teen bonding to YA romance to hype action scenes, the X-Men lore is there but feels out of place and hokey, and despite all of this the whole film amounts to a lot of nothing that's trying to be creepy but not really succeeding, with a big dorky action scene at the end that doesn't seem like it's trying to be anything but funny.

I do think that I had much more fun than I otherwise would have with this because it's the first time I've been in theaters for literal months, and it was just so good to be back - but the fact that Hollywood collectively decided that this was gonna be the first big Blockbuster to re-integrate movie theaters into our pandemic society kinda screams just how out of touch they really are (though I would be willing to bet that this is more of a trial run for Tenet, which seems to be the real behemoth everyone has their eyes on). This very easily could have been released on Disney+ or whatever and nobody would have batted an eye - it probably would have made more money than it will now. But looking over the reactions online, this wouldn't generate enough buzz to motivate people to see it in theaters in normal times, and these certainly aren't normal times.

It really is a shame, because there are some interesting ideas on display here, and the acting is actually quite good, with Maisie Williams and Charlie Heaton in particular doing their damndest to sell some incredibly stiff and hokey lines. The protagonist is an absolute rarity in Hollywood blockbuster franchise cinema; a Native American girl who develops a canonical interacial sapphic relationship within the confines of the film's plot. With better execution, this could have been a hugely groundbreaking story, but here it's just not handled well, and adds to how much of a wasted opportunity this whole project was.

In conclusion, The New Mutants feels like a film that was overstuffed and overrevised to the point where there's almost no sense of identity left, and in its attempt to please everyone that the premise could have possibly attracted, it pleased no-one. It's not a likeable film, but it's not really a hateable one either; there's not much to pick apart besides how it's just a mess with no clear stakes or narrative arc. It's absolutely not something I'd recommend the average movie goer break their pandemic theater fast to go see, and it's not really something I'd recommend them to pay money for in normal times either. It's just a strange, messy epilogue to a franchise that's long run its course.