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 For
centuries, mankind has wondered at the origin of the Egyptian pyramids.
Well, wonder no longer, because it turns out that the ancient Egyptian
culture, so advanced in so many ways, was dragged up from the mud pits
by a mutant. Apocalypse, mutie zero, spawned all the supernatural,
advanced examples of evolution we now know as X-Men. After rising from
a millennia-long nap, Apocalypse is a bit dismayed at the way the human
race has grown to dominate the world he once ran. Knowing there is
strength in numbers, Apocalypse seeks out his own kind; his “children”
to come to his side to eliminate the pesky homosapiens completely. This
position lands him on the completely opposite pole from Charles Xavier,
who, 13 years after establishing a touchy détente with the US government
to end their persecution of mutants, has established his institute for
the young and strange, teaching them to control their powers and be one
with humankind. His old compadres, Erik Lehnsherr, AKA Magneto and
Raven Darkhölme, as was Mystique, have mostly gone underground; the
former living a quiet family life as a miner, the latter dedicating
herself to helping endangered mutants around the world. When Apocalypse
rises and begins to gather his clan, the trio’s differing philosophies
clash once again as they must choose to join Apocalypse or destroy him.
Who
knew there was so much crying in comic books? Am I watching a superhero
movie or a telenovela? So... much… emotion…. Instead of concentrating on
the action or current threat brought on by the awakening of the first
mutant, X-Men: Apocalypse plays up the push and pull relationships from
the previous film, including the Gordian knot between Xavier, Mystique
and Magneto, the lingering affections between Mystique and Hank “Beast”
McCoy, and really, I could not care less.
More
time is spent on the characters’ emotional traumas than in properly
introducing the neophytes who will become huge players, like Psylocke
and Angel. What I cannot abide is how action suffers at the cost of the
drama, like less thought was given to the climactic battle scenes than a
very long subplot about yet another family loss for Magneto. A big
addition to the lore is young Storm, Apocalypse’s first recruit, and in
another show of disregard toward the action, I could see the wires
pulling her awkwardly through the air as she fought the X-Men. However,
when that battle comes to a head, Singer continually cuts back to the
powerful Mohawked mutant sitting safely away from the action, watching
it all with a stupidly dropped jaw.
Possibly the most tragic oversight is in how very unimpressive our main
big bad is. The first mutant, Apocalypse, who ruled at the time of the
pharaohs – who apparently was Pharaoh – whose ultimate goal is the
complete elimination of the human species, is a cinematic dud. He’s
short, he’s not scary, his motivation is not compelling, he doesn’t do
anything that makes the audience gasp, and most egregiously, the make-up
on the character looks ridiculous. He looks like a cross between a
green Muppet and a ventriloquist’s dummy with these strange lines
running down the corners of his mouth. In this age, when you can turn
51-year-old Robert Downey, Jr. into his 20-year-old self pretty
seamlessly, surely they could do more for the main character of an X-Men
movie than cheap latex body paint?
I was
also disappointed at the mediocrity of a moment I’d been waiting for in
the X-Men series since we had a glimpse of it in the 2003 film (I’m
not going to acknowledge the 2006 Brett Ratner fiasco, even though there
is a snarky allusion to it in this film… I wouldn’t laugh too hard, Mr.
Singer). Unfortunately, there is the poor casting choice of Sansa
Stark, I mean, Sophie Turner as psychic Jean Grey (Who this film
proves without a doubt that, yes, she really is just a bad actress, it’s
not just how Sansa is written). Turner has all the fire and
magnetism of a wet Kleenex, and all the emotional heft of one, as well.
Abetted by the unremarkable special effects around the big event, it’s
all – like most of the film - incredibly ho-hum.
Even
the uniformly great James McAvoy, back again as Charles Xavier, can’t
carry the weight of the ballast script (Though my one connection to
the movie’s insistent emotion came when I mourned the loss of Xavier’s
Duran Duran-perfect coiffure). Michael Fassbender, who has been
looking less and less engaged in each subsequent film since 2011’s zippy
First Class, bottoms out here, giving a surprisingly rote, phoned-in
performance. To her credit, Jennifer Lawrence gives a good effort as
Raven/Mystique, but one can sense her trying to keep her feet under the
film’s schizophrenic nature, as it unsuccessfully tries to balance the
character’s emotional life with requisite (I daresay obligatory and
possibly unwanted, in the minds of the writers, who would rather
manipulate sentiment endlessly) noisy action.
The
movie’s two sparks of life come at the frantic, blood-soaked entrance of
our old standby, Wolverine, as we meet him shortly after he went heavy
metal at the hands of his old pal, Colonel Stryker. Feral and
frightening, he cuts a gory swath through his captors and has a fateful
first encounter with Jean, the woman who would become his great love.
Our other jump start feels like a cheat because it’s a shameless rehash
of a superior sequence in the last film. Quicksilver returns just in
time to save the inhabitants of the Xavier school after Apocalypse’s
infiltration of Charles’ global mutant monitor, Cerebro, becomes
explosive, racing against time itself to physically carry and toss the
kids out of the estate as fire consumes it. Evan Peters owns the
puckish, wisecracking speed demon and I looked forward to his every
scene. Strangely, as Singer was so committed to hammering us over the
head with the characters’ personal stories, here’s where he should’ve
done more. This time Peter (Does
Disney own the name Pietro?) Maximoff knows his pappy is Magneto, but we
don’t learn how he found out, and for all the talk of fighting for one’s
family that’s thrown all over the script, they don’t seem to mean
Quicksilver’s.
Ultimately, it’s time for Bryan Singer to step down from this franchise
and make way for a fresher take. The cracks in his vision that began to
show with Days of Future Past, which lumbered compared to the
rejuvenated and exciting First Class, burst into a chasm of fun suck
here. Singer gave X-Men a good start and a great sequel, but that was 16
years ago in a much emptier superhero movie landscape. The sense
of magic and spectacle combined with the firm hand at pacing, narrative
and action needed to create a successful comic book movie simply isn’t
in Singer’s grasp. He instead replaces it with this leaden,
relentlessly turgid soap opera that one can tell he thought he could get
away with by playing the “emotion” card, or saying he wanted a deeper or
different take on the characters. Trouble is, people don’t come to
X-Men or any other comic book movie to cry into their tissues for 2
hours and 20 minutes. Drama is, of course, necessary to some extent for
us to feel a connection with the characters, but that is essentially a
by-product: We want to see super-powered beings doing things no one
else can do. We want bombastic action. We want to see other worlds
we’ve never imagined before. We want fun.
Fun is
extremely thin on the ground with X-Men: Apocalypse. This film, despite
the far too few sparks of life courtesy of Hugh Jackman and Evan Peters,
is a drag, pure and simple. Its ham-fisted, overemotional script,
completely bereft of charm or ingenuity, its utterly unremarkable
villain and second-rate special effects make it the least successful of
the recent Marvel entries. And yeah, you can tease about the Danger
Room as you’re leaving, but I’ll only be interested again when the
director and writers of this particular universe are replaced.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
May 10th,
2016
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