X doesn’t hit the spot this time
|||X-MEN: APOCALYPSE
DIRECTOR: Bryan Singer
CAST: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Sophie Turner and Tye Sheridan
CLASSIFICATION: TBA
RUNNING TIME:143 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
Action overload is the order of the day in Singer’s latest X-Men instalment which should be the last in this trio of reboots.
It plays around with even more characters, re-introducing some, while changing others and just plopping the viewer in the middle of a self-important mess of a movie.
The characters take what happens terribly seriously and even an appearance from Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) doesn’t up the fun quotient like it usually does. Instead, what we get isn’t a clever character study like X-Men: First Class, or something that isn’t as fast paced or coherent and plot-driven as X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Now, in this third film in the current film series, the X-Men face their biggest and baddest opponent yet in Apocalypse (Isaacs), a blue-skinned mutant who turns out to be the first mutant on Earth.
The film’s opening sequence sets up Apocalypse as dating back to about 3600 BC Egypt where he is entombed as his pyramid is destroyed. The opening credits rush us through a badly conceptualised rendering that might be meant to suggest the passage of time, but just looks naff, and then the movie proper starts.
This X-Men movie is set in 1983, with Professor Charles Xavier’s (McAvoy) school in full swing and Mystique (Lawrence) saving mutants from themselves in her own way.
She returns to the school to drop off Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and warn her erstwhile friends about Erik Lensher/ Magneto (Fassbender) popping up as a potential ally for some new big, bad guy who has just manifested in the Middle East.
About an hour-and-a-half into the movie the action shifts to Egypt as Apocalypse is done collecting allies and now just wants to get rid of these pesky mortals and mutants who are messing up his pretty Earth.
You don’t see anything of Isaacs in the Apocalypse character, whose motivation for total extinction is never really fully explained. Setting up a bad guy with God-like powers who just runs roughshod over everyone takes away a lot of focus from anything else that happens because he just obliterates what he doesn’t like and then Magneto gets in on the act and wholesale destruction becomes a bit numbing after a while.
The relationship between the Professor and Magneto, so cleverly delved into in the first two films, is now just at a standstill with the two reiterating the same arguments and not getting any further.
Strangely enough, McAvoy does get to take his character a bit closer to the bald-headed Professor X we know from contemporary comic books and Mystique now goes in a totally different direction to the character we first got to know in 2000 as Magneto’s right hand in all dark deeds.
While the individual characters can be very appealing and charming, no one gets more than two lines at a time to further any agenda or plot.
Themes like what it means to be human or mutants as a threat to humanity or Xavier’s favourite of working for understanding between humans and mutants are all a dim memory.
The bad guys don’t really get to be bad, they’re just there so the X-Men have someone to fight. There’s no team work to speak of and even though it’s the end of the world, you just never have a reason to care.
If you liked Transformers: Age of Extinction, you will like this.