The New Mutants - Random Review

Do you guys even remember that The New Mutants came out last year after literally 3 years in post-production and editing? It came and went without the fuss that the internet seemed to generate around it, with Disney seeming intent on ignoring the film and letting it slide into the ether rather than giving it a push after the Disney-Fox merger. Having seen the film…I do not blame them in the slightest. Batman and Robin, Ghost Rider, Fant4Stic – all terrible, but now they have a new buddy to excrete depression and sorrow with.

So New Mutants, directed and co-written by Josh Boone, takes place in a hospital where a group of young mutants (people with genetic superpowers) are being psychologically evaluated after their powers are discovered. There’s relationship drama, horror and action as these characters struggle with weird demons both internal and external. So your typical teen movie, but with monsters instead of as many hormones.

New Mutants, for those who aren’t aware, was supposedly originally cut by Boone to be a horror-type film which was very tonally different from the rest of Marvel’s slate. Fox then cut him off and re-cut the movie to be more similar to their action-packed X-Men slate, but then allowed Boone to do mild recuts as the Disney-Fox merger occurred. Both Antonio Banderas and Jon Hamm were cut out of the film in post-production, leading many to speculate that the reason for New Mutants’s underwhelming reception was the interference from Fox.

Having seen it, it’s not Fox. It’s 100% Boone.

The studio is not the source of such terrible dialogue, but Boone and his co-writer Knate Lee. The studio didn’t choose the camera with the terrible resolution and weird aspect ratio – Boone did. The studio didn’t make any of the directorial decisions throughout this movie that I hated – Boone did.

This scene does not appear at all in the film, by the way. It's just trailer footage.

Perhaps Boone’s biggest fault as a director is that he’s unable to make the environment of this hospital either scary enough to be a horror nor interesting enough to be an actioner. Already framed with a far-too clean camera that looks like it came off a TV movie, Boone sets many scenes in blue-skied delight in a “hospital” that looks like a red-brick church from an English tea-party story. Rather than the Arkham Asylum feel that he should have gone for, full of shadows and dominated by instability and a sense of the environment being alive, Boone simply presents locations and fails to do anything interesting with them. It’s like me shooting an action movie in my own house – it’s just not a good environment.

What’s even odder is that Boone’s cinematographer is Peter Deming, a master of making creepy, unsettling atmosphere in movies like Mulholland Drive or in Twin Peaks. His work instead feels run-of-the-mill and simple, undermining the potential of the environment.

As a script, New Mutants tries to be 4 movies at once. It wants to be:

- A dark teen drama, opening with scenes of grief counselling and self-harm

- A horror movie, evidenced by frequent nightmare scenes

- A buddy-teen movie, emphasised by the middle portion of random character interactions

- And a superhero movie, as shown by the awful CGI climax.

The movie just cannot commit to one tone and shifts so suddenly between them that it is absolutely hilarious. For instance, at the beginning, it’s implied that one character is suicidal and only uses his powers to try and hurt himself. This plot point is literally never mentioned again.

It doesn’t help that none of these tones work at all;

- The teen drama, as already mentioned, just vanishes.

- The horror is undermined by the flat presentation and repetitive structure.

- The buddy-teen movie isn’t funny as the characters are completely unlikeable.

- The superhero stuff…whoa. The CGI and sound design are so bad that it defies belief considering this was a major studio production, particularly the CGI surrounding Anya Taylor-Joy.

Perhaps the far worse element of this movie is characters and performances. I’ve never seen a movie that immediately tries to get you to hate every single character on screen that you shouldn’t – even evil-focused movies like Bad Lieutenant know how to inject spirit and likeability into their disgusting leads. But when you see the sympathetic Rahne and Sam not given anything to do, the poor line-readings of lead Blu Hunt, the awful depiction of Sunspot (who almost seems to have been written as the villain) and whatever the fuck happened to Anya Taylor-Joy…I just can’t convey how bad it is.

Let’s focus on Taylor-Joy, a terrific actress giving a terribly over-the-top and unnecessary performance here. When she’s introduced, she mocks every single character, including racially harassing Dani, then encourages all of them to commit suicide, forces them to strap on a lie detector to interrogate them, then beats Dani up while all the while refusing to engage with anything other than a hand puppet (which then turns up as a dragon in one shot for no reason whatsoever) – and we’re supposed to eventually sympathise with her. If the giant Demon Bear monster at the end (which is unintentionally hilarious, by the way) had just eaten her, it would have immediately moved this from a 0 to a 5/10.

Readers, I just cannot believe this movie. Everything in it is irredeemable, utterly incomprehensible in what the filmmakers and studio did. At least Fant4stic was mostly clear in what happened and characters didn’t actively try to enrage the audience – The New Mutants is somehow worse. Never see this movie, not even if you are dared to.

Of course, New Mutants gets an F.

Just no. Never again.

If you’ve seen this movie…I’m sorry.