The New Mutants
/“This isn't a hospital. It's a cage.”
Filmology Rating: 2.83 out of 4
The New Mutants is the film Disney doesn't want you to see by changing its release date six times, then finally releasing it when nobody knows theaters are open and exactly one week before a long-awaited Christopher Nolan blockbuster. Then conveniently, two projectors in the theater house I saw this at, were not working.
However, I finally saw it and it felt good to see a new release in a theater again only to have a cricket chirp through the entire runtime, which reflects how I felt while watching it.
A handful of teenage mutants are the only patients in what looks like the location of a 'Saw' movie. There is also one doctor in the entire facility and they're trapped inside and can't leave. I wonder what is going to happen.
It feels good to finally go to a theater to see a movie and know everything that's going to happen from the beginning of the film. This feels like a blender movie, meaning: someone put 'The Breakfast Club,' 'The Dream Warriors,' and 'Glass' in a blender and just shred them all together. The result is a film where nothing happens for over an hour and then the last twenty minutes is complete schlock.
The movie as a whole isn't that bad. It's just very boring. And when I say nothing happens, I mean nothing happens. I was surprised at how much this material was stretched out just to make it to ninety minutes. You could call it some kind of escalation, but it never felt like it was building. Things just kind of happen and all of the scenes feel interchangeable until around the halfway point.
The best part of the film was actually Anya Taylor-Joy. She felt like the only actor who really had a firm grasp on her character and she was the most entertaining to watch. Everyone else, including the lead, were just boring to watch because they all felt like the usual teenage characters you need in like a John Hughes film.
The other main issue with the film is that it tries to be a horror film, but there isn't much horror in the film. It also turns into a CGI extravaganza at one point so it's also not quite a superhero/X-Men film in general. So everything in the film feels like it falls short of something.
This film's premise is a great concept though and they do really try to follow through with it at the end, but for all the film's subtextual mumbo-jumbo, the film itself is not good enough to justify its higher ideas.
It reminds me of a western I saw a while ago called 'The Shooting' with Jack Nicholson. And everyone likes to discuss that film's subtext and how it strips down the genre or whatever, but when you deal in genre, you must first deliver the goods. Then we can discuss its subtext. So if your horror movie doesn't deliver on being a horror movie, then it fails at what it sets out to do regardless of the film's deeper ideas.
The bottom line is that the film is fine. It's not terrible and it's certainly not as bad as 'Dark Phoenix,' but it's so middle-of-the-road that there isn't much to like or be upset about.
Rating: Rent It
-Nolan