The New Mutants

The New Mutants (2020 release) from 20th Century Studios, starring Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy and others, directed by Josh Boone, screenplay by Josh Boone and Knate Lee.

Thought that Fox’s cinematic “X-Men Universe” was over with the under-performing Dark Phoenix? Well, guess again, because this straggler dribbled into a limited release in August this year, having reputedly been completed in all but name in 2017. By rights, they should have entitled it Old Mutants.

The wonder of it is how they took so long applying finishing touches, and still managed to make it look like it was banged out over a weekend by film students at university!

After a traumatic incident wipes out her entire community, Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) awakens in a mysterious institute, where she is informed by Doctor Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga) that she has special abilities, and needs to be trained in their use and control. With time, she and her fellow patients may go on to greater things, heavily implied to be membership of the X-Men, if they can make the grade.

From there it’s a patchwork coming-of-age plot with powers, so indifferently played that one gets the impression everyone was just thinking of topping up the pension fund.

Our heroine and point-of-view character, Moonstar, is dull and turns in a by-the-numbers portrayal, but she is spectacularly outshone in the “monotonous thespianism” pageant by Braga as Dr. Reyes, who performs as if reading a transliteration into a language she doesn’t comprehend, while under heavy sedation. It’s an outstandingly suffocating rendition, with her character’s ostensible initial benevolence and her ultimate sinister agenda delivered in the same stoned-Dalek monotone. (Oh, don’t give me “spoilers”; in the first place, it’s telegraphed pretty broadly from the outset, and in the second place, if you haven’t twigged by now, there’s no way on planet Earth I’m recommending you sit through this!)

There are two distinguished and fine performers in the cast, Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams and Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor-Joy; but you wouldn’t suspect it from their presentations here. Williams, as Rahne Sinclair, mentally “jumps ship” early on, giving us little but a general sweet naiveté and an accent that wanders all over the place, while Taylor-Joy, though a good physical representation of the comics’ Illyana Rasputin, is made to play her as a hugely racist dick, making later attempts to give her character sympathy an insurmountable struggle. Her accessory of a glove-puppet named Lockheed, after the eponymous dragon from the X-Men, is intended to show broken vulnerability behind a tough façade, but registers here as serial-killer fodder.

The cast is rounded out by Henry Zaga as Roberto DaCosta, whose function could most kindly be described as “decorative”, and Charlie Heston as Sam Guthrie, who’s… just sort of there, really. Neither of the token boys on the team is given anything beyond a perfunctory tragic backstory each, and neither has a significant impact on events. If you took both characters out of the plot, the outcome would be much the same.

The only Asian character from the founding membership in the comics, Xi’an Coy Manh, is retconned out, replacing her with latecomer Illyana, and Cecilia Reyes and Roberto DaCosta—both Afro-Latinx in the comics—are both “race lifted” into Caucasian-Latinx here. While we do get a Cheyenne viewpoint character in Moonstar, this nevertheless gives out a disturbing message in terms of non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant visibility.

For the most part, the story is tedious, with a small cast in a limited location having strained revelatory conversations, and occasional special effects so cheap-looking that it’s hard to believe the movie really was intended for major cinematic release pre-Covid. The last thirty minutes or so liven up, as they’re clearly where most of the budget was expended; the Demon Bear and Lockheed (when he “animates”) are both done beautifully, and the performers begin to pay a tiny bit of attention to each other, acting as if they’re actually in the same scene rather than just hanging around waiting for their turn to talk. But it’s a day late and several hundred thousand dollars short; the film by then has capsized under its rote script, ponderous narrative devices and minimal-effort performances.