Untapped Potential

Score: 2.5/5

The New Mutants was interesting. As I watched the short for a superhero 90-minute movie, I kept thinking about how it felt like this was either a first draft or a cut down far too much overproduced final piece. From what I have read it appears to be a bit in the middle. To be upfront, this movie isn’t like the trailer above. Or at least not to the spooky level that you’d think.

Instead, it’s kind of a mix between a horror lite movie for pre-teens and a Breakfast Club-style group of misfits movie. It’s a blend that, at moments, works even if it’s not the movie you are getting in the trailers, but it doesn’t feel earned. I mentioned earlier that the film is a little over 90 minutes; well, you can tell. There were moments when things just felt missing. Nothing that would make the plot not make sense. You can follow it easily enough, but missing in that I didn’t feel connected to any of these mutants’ journeys or relationships. There is a skeleton frame of a movie here that could have used 15 to 20 minutes of additional scenes to really cement what they were aiming for.

At the heart of this thing is a group of traumatized teens, like any other X-Men movie, but instead of having some heroic professors teaching them right and wrong they are in a prison hospital causing them to reexperience that trauma. The concept is interesting and different from the X-Men. The cast is adequate with good actors not given too much to do. It’s these things that make this movie an odd one for me. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. I liked it a bit more because it made me think, “I would like to learn more about this part of the X-Men universe.”

I’m not even frustrated at what I watched, maybe because it was so short, but it does make me wonder what could have happened if director Josh Boone had had the opportunity to do reshoots? Not two years after the Disney Fox purchase where Maisie Williams has aged up considerably, but in the normal half-year or so time frame. What could this have been if this movie was much more horror-like, to an R-rated quality? How much more of a unique and thrilling experience would that have been?

The New Mutants is a middle-of-the-road X-Men movie. It’s not the worst of the bunch, but that comes down to the fact that the setting and scenario are pretty different from the seven X-Men movies before it. Yet, after the successes of Deadpool and the brilliant Logan (which this movie references at one point), it is disappointing that this movie was not more than just okay.