The New Mutants (2020) – Review

What if The Breakfast Club had superpowers and were trapped inside the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? This was basically the concept behind writer/director Josh Boone’s foray into the X-Men universe but due to Disney’s purchase of Fox, which resulted in re-shoots being cancelled and multiple delays to its eventual release, the bigger question one has to ask is “Was it worth the wait?”  Let us now take a look back at this latest X-Men movie and see if it even qualifies as a comic book adaptation let alone a good movie.

The movie opens with Danielle “Dani” Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a young Cheyenne Native American, fleeing with her father (Adam Beach) from what she is led to believe was a tornado, and even though she escapes the destruction of her reservation, including the death of her father, she awakes to find herself chained to a bed in some weird hospital. Turns out that Dani is a mutant and she has been committed to this hospital until she can gain full control of her powers, and while there she will be under the constant supervision of Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga) who couldn’t be more obviously evil if she was wearing an “I love Nurse Ratchet” T-shirt, and it’s the introduction of this character that should make comic book fans quickly come to grips with the fact that this film will be playing fast and loose with the characters found within the X-Men and New Mutants books.

“Hello, I’ll be your chief “In Name Only” X-Men character for today.”

The movie version of Cecilia Reyes is probably the biggest departure from the source material as she was never depicted as villainous within the pages of Marvel Comics, in fact, she never even wanted to be a superhero in the first place but when captured by a Weapon X program she used her medical expertise to help out the other prisoners, which makes turning her into a supervillain here to be one of the worst cases of character assassination to date. Unfortunately, she is not the only comic book character that veers widely from the source material as most of the New Mutants that Dani meets in this facility are radically altered from the comic book persona, so who else shares Dani’s time in this cuckoo’s nest of mutant menaces?

Meet Illyana Rasputin, the worst teleporter in history.

In the comics, Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the younger sister of the Russian X-Men member Colossus but this familial connection is never mentioned, in fact, the very existence of the X-Men is nothing more than a throwaway reference in this movie. Known as Magik, comic book Illyana has the ability to not only teleport through space but time as well, she even ends up trapped in ancient Egypt at one point, and her powers don’t stop at teleportation as her time spent trapped in a “Limbo Dimension” allowed her to gain actual magical abilities that resulted in her becoming the sorceress supreme of her Limbo dimension – eat your heart out Doctor Strange – and she also developed eldritch armour and a magical blade that could disrupt even the most powerful magic as it passes through them. The movie version of Illyana looks very much like her comic book counterpart but it’s all surface-level stuff as the movie has no time to get into what the Limbo Dimension really is – the film certainly can’t get into the who bit of evil sorcerer Belasco kidnapping her into Limbo in the first place – but filmmakers even drop the ball when it comes to her ability to teleport. In the comics, she used this ability to teleport herself from one continent to another, even interplanetary and intergalactic distances on occasion, yet in this movie, she can’t even escape a school that is simply enclosed in a force field. Yet, the film clearly illustrates that her teleporting stems from her ability to enter Limbo in one place and then exit out at a different location, which would make keeping her locked up virtually impossible. Now, the movie could have easily had Dr. Reyes outfit her patients with some sort of mutant restraining collars, that would negate their abilities, but that would have made it harder for our cast of characters to run around displaying their powers in secret.

“We can’t escape because our kryptonite is supreme gullibility.”

But what of our other teen patients? Well, we have Sam “Cannonball” Guthrie (Charlie Heaton) who can “blast off” like a cannonball but his uncontrolled power resulted in him bringing down the whole mine on his father and coworkers, killing the lot of them, which is a very nasty departure from the comic book where Sam’s powers saved two people from the collapsing mine, which he did not cause, I might add. The filmmakers also, for some strange reason, left out the fact that while flying at jet speeds he is encased in an impenetrable force field that protects him from impacts, instead, we now have a dude wearing a cast and a variety of bumps and bruises because his powers are now pretty idiotic.  It’s like giving a character the strength to lift ten tons but not having the bone density to support it. Next up we have Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga) aka Sunspot, who in this movie becomes superheated when stressed or excited – he badly burned his girlfriend while trying to have sex – but comic Sunspot manifested his powers against racists members of an imposing soccer team who had assaulted him, this resulted in him suddenly transforming him into a creature of solid black solar energy, and it should be noted that his girlfriend was the one person not to abandon him and not turned into a crispy corpse as depicted here. It’s also a little odd that the film doesn’t even get the look of his powers right.

Is this Sunspot or the Human Torch?

Up next is Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams) whose mutant powers is being able to turn into a wolf, and though the film pretty much abandoned her ability to transform into a transitional state somewhere between human and wolf, which would have had her looking more like a werewolf than the standard four-legged animal, the character of Rahne in this film is fairly close to her comic book counterpart as in both mediums we learn that she was abused by members of the clergy, unfortunately, the film leaves out that she was rescued from an angry mob by Moira Mac Taggert and later adopted by her. Maybe that will be in a sequel? Just kidding, the purchase by Disney means the chances of a sequel to this film is absolutely zero.

“Do you think the WB would hire us?”

There really isn’t much of a plot to Josh Boone’s version of The New Mutants but what we do get feels more like a pilot episode to a television series than it does a movie, not helped by this being the shortest X-Men movie to date at meagre 94-minutes. The basic plot of the film is that these young mutants believe that they are at this facility until they gain control of their powers and safely join the X-Men, but in actuality, this place is some kind of offshoot facility of the Essex Corporation, with flashbacks from the movie Logan to imply it’s part of the Weapon X program, and that they really being trained to become biological weapons for the bad guys. The wrinkle in the villain’s plan is that Dani’s mutant power, which is the ability to create illusions based on a person’s psyche that can cause actual physical harm, is deemed to be too dangerous and that Reyes is told to collect Dani’s DNA and then have her euthanized. Needless to say, that doesn’t sit well with the other new mutants and soon our scrappy band of misfits decides to set aside their differences and work together. This leads to a key problem, having only one fairly useless villain up against five mutants doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. To offset this disparity in conflict Dani’s mutant ability is treated as the film’s chief antagonist, with it attacking her friends by using their traumatic backstories against them, and thus Reyes could be considered to be nothing more than an incidental lame-duck villain compared to Dani’s manifested vision.

Note: Illyana is attacked by otherworldly beings called the “Smiling Men” that look like a cross between Hollowgasts from Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and “The Gentlemen” from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” which is fitting considering that it looks like Buffy is the only show these kids watch.

For the big climax, the gang must team-up to fight up against “The Demon Bear” an entity that we learn has been following Dani and was the true reason behind her reservation being destroyed, but a vision from her father reveals that this creature is just a manifestation of her own fears and with that lovely nugget of psychobabble she is able to calm the beast and dissipates into the ether. Of course, that’s not quite how it was in the comic book as the Demon Bear was a creature created by a person known as The Adversary who captured Dani’s parents and transformed them into a demonic bear-spirit. Dani did, at first, believe her vision to have been metaphorical in nature but she did learn, eventually, that it was a flesh and blood monster. Now, the movie’s incarnation of The Demon Bear is easily the film’s strongest element and it’s this conflict that allows our heroes to finally use their powers effectively, sadly, it’s a little too late.

That certainly is a badass inner demon.

Stray Observations:

• If you want to gain the trust of your recently acquired mutant maybe having them wake up chained to a bed in a locked room is maybe not the best way to go.
• That Cecilia Reyes is the only staff member in this facility is utterly ridiculous, and I don’t care if she has mutant force-field powers, having only one-person as the stop-gap against a group of burgeoning mutants is just asking for trouble.
• Why this facility exists in the first place makes no sense and it is never explained as to why they weren’t immediately taken to Essex to be studied and trained there in the first place.
• Illyana’s only friend in this movie is a dragon hand puppet named Lockheed, which later transforms into a real little dragon for the big final fight, but Lockheed is actually associated with the teen mutant Kitty Pryde and not Illyana.
• Rahne in the comics developed a crush on Sam Guthrie but in the film, she has a sweet lesbian relationship with Dani, which is one of the few changes that work as it was handled quite well and was rather sweet.

Who needs a “Demon Bear” when you have true love?

It’s clear that Josh Boone was interested in making “A haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers” unfortunately Fox wasn’t too keen on the horrific aspects that Boone had planned, but after some less-than-great test screenings, the studio decided on a heavy amount of reshoots, based on feedback to make it scarier, sadly, the acquisition by Disney resulted in any chance of these re-shoots happening dying on the vine. What we were left with was a movie that was 90% set-up but with very little payoff, and any character development that managed to make it to the screen barely made sense within the final script.  This, of course, is only if we assume there was a final script and that Boone wasn’t just making things up as he went along.

Still, could a more horror-centric version of The New Mutants have worked? Possibly, but the bigger question is “Why even base this on the Marvel Comic when you could have easily made this about any group of supernaturally gifted teenagers being held in a creepy facility?” There are barely any references to the X-Men or other Marvel properties, thus, with but a few name changes and some amped up horror elements you could have had an interesting film, alas, that was not the case and thus we have this “In Name Only” X-Men movie that doesn’t quite have the ability to stand on its own.

Shout out to Maisie Williams who was easily the best part of this film.