I know I’m incredibly late to the party. But then again, so was this movie. After a two year delay, Josh Boone’s take on The New Mutants – and Twentieth Century Fox’s (read: Simon Kinberg’s) last go with the X-Men – finally got its due: that long promised theatrical release. Only not here in Malaysia.
Back in August, cinemas here had just reopened and were desperate for new Hollywood content to entice moviegoers back into their halls. So it was odd when The New Mutants was conspicuously missing from the release calendar. We weren’t given a reason as to why this movie never made it to our shores, but God knows that isn’t going to stop us from speculating.
It could be that The New Mutants was simply too hard a sell. These weren’t the X-Men. There was no name recognition with any of these characters. None of them were wearing anything resembling a comic book costume. And the trailer didn’t really make it clear whether this was a superhero story, or a horror flick, or a YA melodrama. (It tries to be all three, but I’ll get to that later.) With a pandemic-weary public, and cinemas operating at half capacity, there was no way this movie was going to make any money.
On the other hand, it could also have been the case that our local censorship board had a problem with the LGBTQ love story between the two leads. It’s a little conspiratorial, but given how the LPF lost their collective shit over LeFou in Beauty and the Beast, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Now, three months after its theatrical release, the movie is finally available to buy on Blu-ray and VOD. I have seen it and can tell you with some certainty that it isn’t terrible. Yes, it’s a little tepid. Yes, it feels very much like the first movie of a trilogy that will never be made. And no, it probably wasn’t worth the two year wait. But you know what? I didn’t hate it. In fact, there was just about enough here to keep me interested throughout.
The movie tells the story of a group of wayward teens, mutants all, who are seemingly undergoing treatment in an asylum-like institution that’s run by the mysterious Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga). The five of them are especially dangerous and need to work though their respective traumas – and uncontrollable powers – before being set free upon the world at large. Or at least that is what we’re told. Long story short, nothing is what it seems.
Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz’s three issue “Demon Bear” story arc upon which this movie is based is as seminal a work as Watchmen and Marvels and Batman: Year One. What made this one unique was that the villain of the piece wasn’t just another mutant who could move things around with his mind, but rather an extreme expression of repressed rage, and loss, and tempestuous teenage emotion. The bad guys that we encounter in comic books are usually morally and ideologically discernible, often existing as contrasting counterparts to our heroes. The Demon Bear isn’t any of those things. It isn’t about good versus evil, but about trauma, pain, and abandonment, and about how all of that manifests within the human psyche.
It was a young adult melodrama, wrapped within a supernatural horror, wrapped within superhero story. And in this movie, Josh Boone tries to pull it all off within the confines of a locked room.
So here’s what works.
Boone has assembled some of the best young working actors in Hollywood today. Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, and Blu Hunt give really watchable performances, delivering even the cheesiest lines without winking at the camera.
He also makes full use of his limited budget. There is nothing about the production of this movie that exceeds its grasp. The location is suitably grim. The action sequences are visually inventive. And the CGI looks and feels expensive.
There are, however, two places where the movie falls short. The first, is in the way it chooses to frame its narrative. These are characters who are forced to go through a standard superhero origin story with the promise of meatier marquee roles in the next movie. Everything here is setup. We know there’s a heroic awakening coming, where everyone realises their worth and comes together as a team, it just needed to happen sooner.
The second problem with The New Mutants, and the thing that holds it back from being great, is that Josh Boone doesn’t quite commit to any of the three genres that he’s dabbling in. This movie isn’t quite YA enough, or scary enough, or superhero-y enough.
This is made worse by the fact that, throughout the movie, we keep seeing clips from Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a television in the background. Which only serves as a really unfortunate reminder of how to successfully achieve everything this movie was going for.
Don’t get me wrong. Josh Boone is an incredibly competent director. His take on The Fault in Our Stars was a wonderfully unhurried and unpretentious sobfest, and one of the better movies of 2014. That said, he may have bitten off a little more than he could chew with The New Mutants, where the end result is a movie that tries hard, but could do better.
But at least it’s no Dark Phoenix right?
The New Mutants
94 minutes
Director: Josh Boone
Writers: Josh Boone and Knate Lee
Cast: Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga
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