‘The New Mutants’ Is A Beautiful Mess
By Connor Danz, Staff Writer
Directed by Josh Boone, ‘The New Mutants’ is a movie that by all logic, should have never seen the light of day. This film began production in March, 2016 with filming taking place in September, 2017 with an April, 2018 release date in mind. The film would end up releasing in August 2020 following multiple delays due to reshoots that never happened, a major corporate buyout, and a global pandemic preventing its release. With its trailer debuting three years before its theatrical release date, one has to wonder how such a broken movie could be released under these circumstances.
The movie follows our lead character, Danielle Moonstar, played by Blu Hunt. When her family is attacked on their reservation, she escapes the entity destroying the reservation and passes out in the wilderness. She wakes up in the care of Dr. Cecilia Reyes, played by Alice Braga, and she tells her that she is a super powered mutant and will be staying at this hospital/campus for the time being until she can control her power. On this campus there are 4 other mutants learning to control there powers as well, these mutants being, Rahne Sinclair (Wolfsbane) played by Maisie Williams, Illyana Rasputin (Magik) played by Anna Taylor-Joy, Samuel Guthrie (Cannonball) played by Charlie Heaton, and Roberto de Costas (Sunspot) played by Henry Zaga. They all partake in Breakfast Club-esque sequences of hijinks until dark creatures and events from their past start to haunt them while Danielle’s powers go out of control as Dr. Reyes receives orders on how to treat the mutants from her mysterious boss.
‘The New Mutants’ suffers a plethora of issues, from its direction, to the acting, but the ultimate flaw of the film is its lack of focus. New Mutants tries to be a romance, teen comedy, superhero, and horror movie all at the same time and does each to varying degrees of success. To my shock, the romance between Danielle and Rahne was the most well executed aspect of the movie with their blossoming romance throughout the movie being almost entirely believable, with the one exception being the lackluster performance of Blu Hunt, which drags down many parts of this movie, leading to a lot of the teen drama elements falling flat. The teen comedy sequences that very much resemble “The Breakfast Club” are also done to a reasonable degree of quality and do not overstay their welcome, but don’t take much away from its generic feel.
The superhero element is where the movie’s many goals really start to slip and fall apart in the quality department. Firstly, for being mutants who are special because of their super powers, they barely get any screen time with Cannonball and Sunspot using their powers all of three and two times respectively. They also had the classic superhero cliche of fighting a big brutish enemy as a climax where they all use their powers to beat it. The most unintentionally hilarious part of this movie and it’s biggest failure is its horror elements. For context; there were small horror-ish scenes filmed for the movie original to add a bit of punch to the movie, but the trailer producers cut the trailer to make it seem like a full blown horror movie, which forced executive at Fox to demand more horror elements be added. That being said, most of the horror sequences in this movie are laughable and amount to “scary thing screams” with idiotically designed creatures from the kids’ past like Roberto’s incarcerated girlfriend and the Smiley Guys who haunt Illyana.
Overall, New Mutants is a laughable attempt at a modern day superhero movie. Despite that, If you have a buddy, I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. Objectively however, this is a very flawed and poorly made movie.
Rating: 2/10