The New Mutants
Meet the New Mutants. Disturbingly undistinguished
from the old ones.
dir: Josh Boone
2020
A cursed movie…trying to come out in a deeply cursed year. Every flick that was meant to come out this year can claim to be cursed now, because of, you know, the floating death in the air thing, but this flick was cursed long before the virus raised its ugly head.
The New Mutants, really, didn’t stand a chance. In a normal year it would have been released in cinemas and then disappeared three weeks later, and accountants and jerks in marketing would have argued for a while as to what went wrong, and then everyone including the people in it would have forgotten about it and moved on with their lives.
It could be that audiences don’t care about mutants or X-Men or X-Men-related bullshit anymore, if they ever did, especially when there’s no Hugh Jackman with shiny claws and sideburns involved. It could also be that they’ve had enough of a crack at it, and they could leave this X-Men stuff alone for a decade or two before endlessly rebooting again and again.
When this was put together, they probably thought having Maisie Williams in it would be pretty great. She is, after all, pretty great. She singlehandedly saved Westeros / Game of Thrones, and created a moment of television history that will be remembered long after the dragons and the endless sexual violence are (hopefully) forgotten. And she was great throughout the show.
But this stupid year is the year of Anya Taylor-Joy, who has completely dominated streaming services and television, be it in perplexing chess dramas, in Jane Austen adaptations and virtually everything else in existence, including this standard mutant fare. She doesn’t have to do much other than turn up, so good luck for her.
This is, to be honest and fair, a fairly shitty, shoddy movie, with a bunch of people in their twenties playing teens and trying to get that YA energy, trying to reboot a franchise with new and therefore cheaper characters, and also, inexplicably, trying to make a horror flick with teen protagonists that makes no sense as horror or a teen flick or a new YA franchise.
It’s not all bad, though. Maisie Williams is great. It hardly matters what her character is called, or what she does, or why she has a Scottish accent, or why she’s being tormented by a Catholic-looking priest, which makes no sense if she’s Scottish. I’m just glad she’s here, in the same way I’m glad to see her in anything.
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