The New Mutants (Review)
Here’s Hoping The New Mutants Disney Gives Us Are Better Than These Ones.
Well, after two decades 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film franchise has ended with The New Mutants. Not with a bang like fans might have hoped, but an unfinished abomination shrieking “kill me!” Even after all these years, it’s hard not to remember the excitement I felt at the sight of the first trailer back in 2017. Since then the film has undergone a number of reshoots and edits, especially after Disney bought up Fox back in 2019. That doesn’t excuse the mess that resulted from what I assume was another case of too many cooks in the kitchen, but it might explain why it turned into such an unfocused wreck. The only comfort is that even with everything wrong with The New Mutants, it isn’t quite as bad as Dark Phoenix, but it’s close.
The New Mutants focuses on a group of; you guessed it, new mutants who have been sequestered in a treatment center for the sake of public safety while they get their newfound powers under control. In doing so, the film takes on a “juvenile offender” vibe that sets the characters up to butt heads and conveniently offer exposition in the form of group therapy. At the center of this new X-Men film is Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a girl who loses everything in a freak incident only to awaken days later in this strange facility. As time goes on, she gets to know the other teens there and the doctor in charge of their care, but finds herself with more questions than answers. One thing is for certain though, something sinister is lurking in the shadows, just waiting for its chance to pounce. The only question is if it will be too much for the patients committed there and their incredible abilities
I never got into The New Mutants comics as a kid. So, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the characters in the film, but we got a whole slew of, well, new mutants played by the likes of Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, and Henry Zaga. While each of the characters hints at a traumatic and intriguing back story, The New Mutants does a really poor job of telling those stories. There are a few flashbacks and everyone expressing how much they don’t want to talk about it, but the film never really gives the audience an idea of what each of them lost when their powers manifested. It’s as though they exist in a void which makes it very hard to establish any sort of connection with them in their moments of vulnerability, which undermines the emotional core of the story.
By the end of The New Mutants, I have no better idea of who any of these characters are or even what their powers are exactly than I did in the first 15 minutes. For example, while Anya Taylor-Joy’s character, Illyana Rasputin, seems pretty cool, I have no idea what her powers actually do, but she has a sword and portals and some kind of dragon that may or may not exist… It’s hard to tell really, just like it’s impossible to tell with any of them unless you have a comic background. Even then, The New Mutants seems bound and determined not to hint at much about the character’s alter-egos or future as mutants. In the end, The New Mutants offers plenty of questions but very few answers.
My philosophy is that a hero is really only as good as their villain, and The New Mutants has a serious villain problem. It hints at Alice Braga’s Dr. Reyes as the big primary antagonist for the teens to deal with, but the film is so busy trying to build intrigue that it forgets to reveal why we should be worried about her in the first place. Hardcore comic fans might notice a few hints at one of the A-list X-Men villains creeping behind the scenes, but even then it never feels like there’s any serious threat from her character. In fact, it seems like she’s genuinely trying to help them for the majority of the film. As I mentioned, there is something more sinister lurking in the shadows, which gives The New Mutants a bit of a horror vibe, but it fails to commit to the genre by giving the mysterious threat a face for audiences to dread. Even if it had, a PG-13 rating would have made it difficult to combine superheroes and horror (Brightburn needed an R-rating to do it).
The New Mutants is hardly the ending that the X-Men franchise deserved. I’m sure this won’t be the last time we see mutants on the big screen since Disney is sure to be milking every penny out of their newly acquired toys, but it still feels like the end of an era. A part of me is hoping that there might be a director’s cut in the future in order to see how mangled the film became since 2017, just because I love the idea of a horror superhero flick. Until then, though, I can’t say that I recommend this film, especially to casual fans of the characters. I know more than the average bear about comics, and I was still pretty lost through most of The New Mutants. Perhaps they’ll fare better in the inevitable reboot, but their first outing was definitely a disappointment.
