The New Mutants (2020) We don't really want to spend a whole lot of time beating up on this poor, star-crossed, misbegotten pathetic little movie......
It would be like kicking a starving kitten with only two legs.........
Its tortured production history (which we'll not detail for fear of putting ourselves and you, dear visitors, into a deep coma), includes the usual stuff......rewrites, reshoots, rescheduled release dates.
And also something the filmmakers couldn't possibly have anticipated - Disney gobbling up 20th Century Fox, which initiated this junior-varsity reboot of the X-Men franchise.
For a comic book superhero movie, it's a modest, lower budgeted, claustrophobic affair, with a small teenage cast confined to a creepy ,and abandoned loony-bin setting.
Within that limiting framework, the movie does try mixing and mashing up multiple genres and tropes.......thrown into this stew are indigestible chunks of "One Few Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "The Breakfast Club" and any number of scenes and ideas borrowed from teen slasher-horror movies.
Our five troubled X-kids, (with various powers we won't bother describing lest we all once again stray into terminal coma-boredom territory), find themselves incarcerated by a Nurse Ratched type employing the standard creepy passive-aggressive group therapy.
This invariably leads (as if anyone couldn't already guess) to a booga-booga, Halloween procession of assorted CGI monsters, demons and whoop-dee-doo displays of our angsty gang's super powers.
For anyone who's sat through and suffered through dozens and dozens of X-Men and Marvel movies, it's almost impossible to watch "The New Mutants" without giving in to eye rolling yawns.
And the only reason we subjected ourselves to this movie was the live-wire presence of our favorite actress of the last several years, Anya Taylor-Joy.
The film's producers clearly knew she's the main attractions here. Playing the only X-Kid with a personality and a pulse, she grabs this hapless little movie by its scruffy neck and makes it her own......(you can compare it to the way Angelina Jolie's supporting performance totally dominated "Girl Interrupted")
It's a true measure of our admiration for the charismatic, beautiful ATJ that we bothered at all to endure "The New Mutants"........
That's why you can believe the single star we're giving it (*) is for her alone. Unless you're a hardcore comic book superhero fan-person and as big a fan of Taylor-Joy as we are, proceed with extreme caution.......
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