Sunday 29 May 2016

X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence
Writer: Simon Kinberg
Director: Bryan Singer


*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***



After being unwittingly released from imprisonment after thousands of years, original mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) sets a plan in motion to cleanse the world of, well, pretty much everyone except for the four fellow mutants he's recruited, one of which is a revenge-driven Magneto (Fassbender). Trying to prevent Apocalypse from bringing about the, er, Apocalypse is Professor X (McAvoy), along with Mystique (Lawrence) and a group of gifted youngsters from X's academy...

The latest instalment in the X-Men franchise promises much - a more powerful bad guy than ever before, the introduction of new characters, the re-introduction/reboot of old ones - but ultimately doesn't quite deliver. Part of the problem can be spotted with a quick glance at the poster above. Even with a sizable running time of 144 minutes, how can the movie hope to cram in so many characters and do them all justice? The short answer is that it can't.

Established characters are still given the room to breathe, namely McAvoy's Xavier, Lawrence's ever more dour Mystique and Fassbender's Magneto, who goes through a dispiritingly similar arc to previous encounters. He starts off good, a tragic event sends him bad, but will the humanity within him win out in the end? Don't get me wrong, Fassbender's great but can't his character be given something else to do than wrestle with his conscience and tell McAvoy that his willingness to save mankind died long ago?

The new characters are each given their own introductions, with varying degrees of success. Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and NIghtcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) elicit some degree of sympathy and hint at bigger parts to play next time out, Storm (Alexandra Shipp) is terrific but under-used and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) has a striking look but is given no depth at all. The new Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is less dangerous psychic, more grumpy teenager and Angel (Ben Hardy) fares least well of all, only making an impact when he's involved in a high-speed collision with the deck.

As this movie's big bad, Oscar Isaac battles an odd make-up job as Apocalypse and manages a couple of effective moments but considering he's all-powerful the scrap against him never seems desperate enough. There's the requisite amount of destruction - top tip: get away from the bridges linking Manhattan to the other boroughs of New York, they always seem to cop it - and the X mansion is once again the target of some extreme remodelling but most of the big set-pieces are oddly lacking in real X-citement (apologies, I'm an idiot for putting that in).

And yet, in the midst of this unrelentingly average blockbuster there's one sequence which is definitely one of my favourites of the year so far - in which Quicksilver (the excellent Evan Peters) embarks upon a one-man rescue mission to save absolutely everyone in an about-to-be-destroyed building. It's fun, it's inventive, it's thrilling and it hints at what the rest of this movie could have been.

Overstuffed and undercooked, this is a something of a disappointment considering how much I enjoyed First Class and Days of Future Past. It's a long way from being terrible but given the quality of the talent on both sides of the camera it should have been so much better. Oh, and the cameo appearance from a X-Men fan favourite appears to have wandered in from a different and more adult movie.

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