The New Mutants is infamous by now and it seemed like this would never see the light of day. Not only infamous for its reshoots and troubled production, but because it was postponed so many times I lost count. So, with a broken heart I can say I finally had a chance to delve into this rotten corpse. I was never expecting this to be good, but at the very least mindless fun.
To be fair, I've seen way worse than The New Mutants. The cast is quite intriguing and everyone does a decent job even if their characters are just one dimensional and uninteresting for the most part. Anya Taylor-Joy is the one who fares best from the group, with her shinning in a mediocre role with an over-the-top accent. I actually enjoyed her presence a lot. Alice Braga brings a lot of charm to a character that's supposed to be mysterious and menacing. Sadly, her antagonist is wasted and never gets a shining moment. We never really get a sense that she's putting the characters in any danger. Not her fault though. Charlie Heaton and Henry Zaga are underused and I would've loved to see more screentime of their characters.
If anything I'm sure somewhere in time there was a decent movie here but the finished product feels lazy, cheap and you can clearly tell this was heavily trimmed in the editing room to make way for a safe and unmemorable superhero "action/horror" movie. Never really succeeding in either the horror or action department. The action takes so long to kick in and it's such a short movie for a superhero we don't delve deep into the little story we have or into the lives of our leads. We just have characters walking around spitting cheesy dialogues until a bad cgi giant bear pops up and voilá! We are in act 3.
Another criticism I have is the terrible CGI. I've seen better effects in the SyFy channel. The relationship between Blu Hunt (The Originals) and Maisie Williams (The Owners) is sweet but never fully fleshed out and I wish that would've been explored as its probably one of the highlights (OMG our first gay superhero!! *yawn*). Still, a lesbian relationship in a superhero movie is long overdue.
And I guess this is my final complaint: our female lead is dull and uninteresting. I never felt invested in her for one second. I wish Anya Taylor-Joy would've been the focus.
Recommendation: See this only out of curiosity as The New Mutants is as uninspired as movies get.
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