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Oscar Isaac destroys something else (again) in misfire X-Men Apocalypse |
Director: Bryan Singer
Cast: James McAvoy (Charles Xavier/Professor X), Michael
Fassbender (Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/Mystique), Oscar
Isaac (Apocalypse), Nicholas Hoult (Hank McCoy/Beast), Rose Byrne (Moira
MacTaggert), Evan Peters (Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver), Tye Sheridan (Scott
Summers/Cyclops), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Olivia Munn (Psylocke), Kodi
Smit-McPhee (Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler), Alexander Shipp (Ororo Monroe/Storm),
Lucas Till (Alex Summers/Havoc), Josh Helman (Colonel William Stryker), Ben
Hardy (Angel)
Where do you go with a franchise when you are on at least
your second timeline (maybe more, who knows?) and earth-shattering destruction has
been done so many times before? At one point in this movie, our young heroes
head to the cinema to watch Return of the
Jedi – with a genre savvy conversation following on whether the third film
in a franchise is always the worst. You’d like to think if you were going to
pop such a hostage to fortune in the third film of your franchise, then you’d
be busting guts to make this film as stand-out as possible. Doesn’t happen.
It’s 1983. Charles (James McAvoy) is still running his
school with Hank (Nicholas Hoult). Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence – looking
for every single second as if she is only there by contractual obligation) is
saving mutants left, right and centre on the underground. Magneto (Michael
Fassbender) is living incognito in Germany with a wife and daughter. All that
is about to be thrown into chaos when Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac, trying his very
best to make an impression under piles of make-up), the very first mutant,
rises from imprisonment after thousands of years. The most powerful mutant in
history, he decides the world is ripe and ready for the taking.
In X-Men: Apocalypse,
not only is more not more, but the film churns out emotional character and
relationship beats, covered to exhaustion in other movies. One glance at
Magneto’s family and anyone who has ever seen a movie is going to know they are
not long for this world. Raven and Charles no sooner appear in the same frame than
you know the two of them are going to struggle to reconcile their past with
their different viewpoints. We’ve seen it all before – and you feel, in the
slightly disengaged performances, that the cast have had enough as well. Even Apocalypse,
for all his world-altering power, basically has the same agenda as every mutant
villain this franchise has ever had before: Mutant Superiority.
Around these familiar plot beats, we get action that also
feels culled from before. The film culminates in such earth-shattering
destruction you really feel it should
be more exciting, but instead it feels tediously familiar. How many times have
we seen cities devastated like this? It’s such a cliché that the millions of
people who must have died in the
planet-wide obliteration that consumes the final third of the film don’t even
merit a mention. It’s like the world treats this global destruction with the
same meh that you feel a number of
the film’s viewers do.
But then the whole film has a weary sense of inevitability
about it, of going through the motions. The plot makes little or no sense.
Apocalypse is awoken by a cult we never hear from again, the whole film takes
place in a few days, barely enough time to build up any sense of peril – but
also somehow too short a time for the vast number of comings-together of
different characters to feel natural. Characters from past films are thrown in
willy-nilly, often for no real reason. So from the first scene we have Moira
MacTaggert and Havoc back from the first film, then Quicksilver is back to
repeat his bullet-time action from Days
of Future Past (saying that, this sequence, as Quicksilver rushes to save
people from an exploding mansion to the tune of Sweet Dreams, is the most vibrantly enjoyable moment in the film).
We even get Stryker back, a character who becomes more and more of a cartoony
villainous idiot each time he appears.
In between these points, the film frequently misses its
beats. Apocalypse’s assembled group of mutant followers are assembled with such
casual indifference (Apocalypse basically seems to pick up the first four
mutants he meets) that their characters and motivations barely register.
Obviously we know Storm is destined to be a goodie, so we get a few seconds of
establishment that she is basically a goodie. Magneto gets his painfully
predictable backstory (Michael Fassbender is by the way totally wasted in this
movie, forced to repeat the same notes over and over again from the last two
films). The other two barely make an impression – other than perhaps Olivia
Munn’s unbelievably fanservice costume.
But it also makes more serious errors. A hideously
distasteful moment sees Magneto destroy the whole of Auschwitz in a rage. There
is, quite frankly, something more than a little stomach turning about the site
of a real atrocity – where millions died – being blown away on screen like any
other major landmark. Even more disgusting to have it serve as a shallow,
over-exploited “he feels pain because he was in the Holocaust” moment. Other
times in this series this link has worked – here it manifestly doesn’t.
About the only thing that really works here is the darker
interpretation of Charles – McAvoy making it clear that events have made Xavier
far more willing to go to dangerous ends to protect his family – and there is a
neat replay of the first conversation between Xavier and Magneto from the very
first film in the franchise, with the stresses all changed to show that their
positions have developed in a far different way in this new timeline. But
that’s the only real moment that feels new.
But I’ve still got a certain affection for these X-Men
movies, and this isn’t the worst one they’ve ever made (that’s always going to
be X-Men Origins: Wolverine), but
it’s up there. It somehow doesn’t feel special, more like a film that had to be
made for legal and financial reasons, rather than because there seemed like a
decent story to be told, or something unique to be said. The rushed plot and
lack of engaging characters make more sense when you think about it like that.
It’s nothing special at all, and seems to pass in front of your eyes and then
just as quickly out of your memory.
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