Review: The New Mutants is the Breakfast Club of X-Men movies

The New Mutants is NOT an epic send-off to Fox’s X-Men series, but if you just want a fun, light time at the movies, it has you covered.

Last week, The New Mutants was shown on screens across the country, making it one of the first new movies released in theaters since the coronavirus all but shut down the film industry in the U.S. back in March. To say that this release was a gamble feels like the understatement of the year. While some theaters are opening back up, many remain closed due to the pandemic. But even more importantly, many viewers still appear reticent to risk infection for the sake of watching a movie in a poorly ventilated theater. It doesn’t bode well for summer movie releases, especially ones with as rocky a production as The New Mutants.

Other companies are looking into alternative solutions to this problem, with Disney’s decision to release Mulan on Disney+ (for an extra fee) being the most high-profile example. For The New Mutants, I found a way to see it while giving the coronavirus the slip by going to the drive-in, which might just be the perfect way to experience this light, teenage action/horror popcorn flick.

The New Mutants tells the story of Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a Native American girl who is orphaned in a mysterious and traumatic event at the beginning of the movie. She wakes up in a secret facility where she learns that she is a mutant (remember, this movie takes place in the world of the X-Men, although none of the characters we’ve grown familiar with over the past couple decades of movies show up). Until it’s clear what her power is — and that she isn’t a danger to herself or others — Danielle is told she must stay at the facility by the kind-yet-obviously-less-than-honest Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).

Fortunately, she’s got four other new mutants to keep her company in the facility: Ilyana (played by The Witch‘s Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam (Charlie Heaton of Stranger Things fame), Roberto (Henry Zaga), and Rahne (the inimitable Maisie Williams). The cast is far and away one of the best things about the movie. With the sole exception of Heaton’s southern accent, the actors were always a joy to watch and did the best they could with the material they were given.

Image: The New Mutants/Fox/Disney

Each mutant has a closet full of skeletons that come back to haunt them (sometimes quite literally) throughout the movie. There’s petty infighting, most of which is incited with brilliant maliciousness by Ilyana. There’s also a surprisingly well-handled LGBTQ relationship, which The New Mutants deserves credit for deftly including without getting ham-fisted about it.

These sorts of interactions are really what The New Mutants is about. Unlike many of the huge ensemble adventures that the X-Men are best known for, this is a tightly contained film. Nearly the entire movie takes place inside the secret new mutant acclimation facility, and aside from a handful of characters who appear briefly in nightmares and flashbacks, there are only six cast members. The movie heavily focuses on the interpersonal relationships between the core cast, to the point where there really is very little in the way of a long-game plot. The New Mutants is all about the relationships.

And that’s a good thing, because actors like Williams and Taylor-Joy do a tremendous job of carrying any scene they’re in, in spite of the film’s single greatest weakness.

If The New Mutants has an Achilles’ heel, it’s the writing. Over the course of its development, the movie was worked on by no less than eight different writers…and that inconsistency shows in the finished product. In one early scene, Sam tells his friends that he thinks he belongs in the facility, since he’s unintentionally harmed others with his powers. Several scenes later, he declares that he just wants to be free to leave. Were that the only example of this kind of jumbled writing, it wouldn’t have been a big deal…but unfortunately, The New Mutants is riddled with examples like this. At times, the inconsistencies were outright groan-worthy.

The big question, though: Is The New Mutants still worth seeing? Aside from the obvious caveat about seeing it in a safe way, it all depends on your expectations. If you are hoping for an epic send-off to Fox’s X-Men movies, this is not that. But if you want to watch a fun movie with pretty solid special effects, excellent actors, and a plot that is, at the very least, not boring, then The New Mutants can certainly scratch the movie-going itch.

This is the Breakfast Club of X-Men movies…and so long as you know that going into it, it can still be a pretty fun time.

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