The New Mutants (2020) Review

 "This isn't a hospital.  It's a cage."

-Illyana Rasputin

After her entire reservation is destroyed, Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) finds herself at a strange facility for mutants to learn how to control their powers.  Dani and the other mutants notices start to see figures from their nightmarish pasts and begin to realize this place isn't what they thought it was.

Spoiler Alert for The New Mutants below.  This movie has a ton of problems that I can't talk about without spoiling the movie.  It's a bad film with a ton of wasted potential.  It's different and interesting to examine, but don't spend any money on it if you want to watch it.

What Works:

Although this is an X-Men movie, The New Mutants is a horror movie first and a superhero movie second.  That's awesome!  It's a cool route for the series to take because I think superhero movies are on the brink of becoming stale.  While this movie has a lot of problems, I love that they tried to do something different with it.

The horror elements are the best part of the movie and they mostly appear in the form of nightmares.  It turns out Dani's power is to bring nightmares to life, so we get a lot of creepy moments in the form of men with smiley masks, abusive religious figures, burning corpses, demonic bears, and an awesome scene with coal miners.  These elements are great and are used well, I just wish we got more of them.

Maisie Williams plays by far the most interesting character in Rahne.  She's extremely religious, but her mutation made her community believe she was a witch.  She has easily the most interesting backstory, plus her power is she's basically a werewolf.  She's also Dani's love interest and it's pretty cool that our two main characters in a superhero movie are LGBTQ.  I don't think that's happened before and both characters have excellent chemistry.

Finally, the 3rd act of the movie is by far the best.  It's explosive and exciting as the nightmares rampage and the facility falls apart.  It's what I wanted the movie to be from the get-go and it's exciting when we finally get here.

What Sucks:

The New Mutants tells it's story in the completely wrong way.  The central mystery should be; "what is this place and what are they up to?"  That's not the case.  Instead, the mystery is; "What happened to these characters in their past?"  The majority of the conflict comes from kid vs. kid when it should have been kids vs. facility.  That would have been way more interesting.  The kids needed to come together earlier on to figure out the truth behind the facility.  Instead, that's all saved for the 3rd act and that's a shame.  You can still have the tension between the mutants, but the conflict dynamic isn't as interesting as it could have been.

The movie jumps around a lot and leaves the characters intentionally vague.  I just wanted to have a full scene to really get to know these characters, but no.  It's frustrating to say the least.  Let me get to know and care about these characters!  

The facility is run by one person, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).  That makes zero sense.  How can one person watch five kids, maintain the facility, and ever get any sleep?  Why not have more staff and create more conflict between the kids and the facility.  Dr. Reyes isn't even interesting.  She's just kinda there.  It doesn't make logical sense and it hurts the story.

Finally, Anya Taylor-Joy plays Illyana Rasputin who can teleport, give herself a magic sword, and has a stuffed dragon she can bring to life (which she only does once).  She's the worst.  She's overly aggressive and frustrating to deal with.  I hated almost every second she's was on screen.  I get she has a really messed up backstory, but she's not a character I want around.  It doesn't help that her powers are dumb.  The movie has her bully Dani the entire time when it should be focusing on the fact she killed like 18 people.  If she were portrayed as an unhinged psychopath, that's one thing, but instead we just get a bully.  She should not have been the primary antagonist for the majority of the movie.  It should have been Dr. Reyes.

Verdict:

This movie had so much potential, but it wasted it.  The story is different, the horror elements work well, and Maisie Williams is great, but the conflict is created in the wrong way, there are aspects that don't make sense, and Illyana is just the worst.  I really wanted to like this movie, but I don't and that sucks because it could have been something really special if a little more thought had been put into it.

 4/10: Bad