Five young mutants are being held in a secret facility after becoming a danger to society when they cannot control their abilities. They must fight against the past to have a future.
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Danielle Moonstar is the latest young mutant to wake up not knowing what had happened and why she was handcuffed to a bed. Through flashbacks or dreams we see small pieces of what happened to her. We also get to see the same for Rahne, Illyana, Sam and Roberto slowly seeing what pushed them to end up under Dr. Reyes supervision.
The major issue with the film has to be that they decided to attempt the crossover into a horror type, but also keeping the X-Men theme. This does not work. I will admit that the smiley face men were extremely creepy though and that was probably the scariest part. It was just all very messy and more importantly disappointing.
Disappointing because the potential for it to be a very interesting strand of the X-Men Universe could have cemented it as one of the best in the franchise. Even if the timeline never matches and its all over the place. With the basis for the story and these young mutants being held in a very different manner to what we see in First Class and then going forward with Professor X and the school.
The backstories were a little bit cliched and throwing in religion and abuse just didn't really have the best delivery. Forced romances and moments that just seemed to be put in because fillers were needed. Quite crazy considering the running time of the film is only 94 minutes, could be one of the longest feeling films with that running time. It just seemed to be very repetitive in having to go through the same type of thing for each character in turns. Especially when the reason behind this was immediately obvious.
Wasted potential is certainly the way to look at it considering the five young actors are all impressive on other popular projects. The only new comer to me was Blu Hunt. When you see the rest Maisie Williams and her Game of Thrones background. Charlie Heaton part of Stranger Things. Anya Taylor-Joy in Split and Peaky Blinders. Henry Zaga in 13 Reasons Why. They are a talented bunch which makes the outcome of this film even more disappointing. Leaving everyone to really wonder what might have been.
The New Mutants seemed to be a very doomed film considering its original release date was supposed to be April 2018 but the first delay was due to needing reshoots. Then other factors including the release of the terrible X-Men: Dark Phoenix pushed back to March 2020 then fell victim to the Covid pandemic. Eventually being release now, which makes you wonder just how after all that time and initial reshoots that we have ended up with this mess of a film?
*I feel I must add that even though I have rated this with one star it is still better than X-Men: Dark Phoenix*