The New Mutants: The Breakfast Club with super powers, and a badly adapted dead end for an old franchise
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
A mutant film in both title and practice, The New Mutants, is an unfortunate misfit off-shoot of the X-Men family tree.
Directed by Josh Boone, of the teen melodrama, The Fault in Our Stars, it’s part super-hero origin story (connected to The X-Men franchise), and a horror movie with a strained “woke” YA take on abuse, bigotry and homosexuality -- though also with hints of girls-in-prison exploitation. This one, to quote Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, Stefon, has everything.
New mutants, old franchise.
Originally shot in 2017, and delayed for various reasons including the sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney, The New Mutants, lands in theatres at a point when audiences may well be inclined to wait for more compelling reasons to risk their health.
The story, based on a 1982 graphic novel by Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod, is told through the experience of an earnest, Cheyenne girl named Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), who survives a traumatic event that kills her family, and who wakes up handcuffed to a hospital cot in a ramshackle experimental medical facility. Her backstory is tied up with a fictional Cheyenne “legend” of the dueling good-and-evil bear spirits within each of us (but with no baby bear that’s just right).
In the antique red-brick facility with locked cells for bedrooms, five teen-aged inmates are housed. They’re overseen by just one staff member, the enigmatic Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga), who monitors everyone on-camera, gives injections, performs tests, reads a big computer screen and sends reports to the mysterious Essex Corporation which digitally issues orders back.
Dr. Reyes explains, sort of, to Dani what’s going on: She’s in a facility for teen mutants, though her special powers have not yet been revealed.
Soon, Dani meets her fellow inmates, a Breakfast Club assortment of adolescents who have all done something bad and had bad things done to them. The young cast, a few of whom are known from other shows, are more interesting for their slightly off-beat looks as much as the inconsistent performances. The group include Rahne (Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams), a winsome apple-cheeked Scottish lass, who has both lesbian and wolfish tendencies.
Then there’s handsome muscular Brazilian boy Roberto (Henry Zaga), a literal hot Latino who has a tendency to catch fire. Then there’s Sam (Charlie Heaton of Stranger Things), a Kentucky coal miner’s son who’s slow-talkin’ style is at odds with his ability to whirl about in flashes of light.
Most distinctive is the ill-tempered Russian, Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy of The Witch) with elfin features beneath a blonde geometric haircut, and a terrible attitude to match her accent. The one-time victim of child trafficking has the ability to teleport, and has an arm that turns into a glowing sword.
After a half-hour or so of exposition, we discover this apparently low-budget, derivative teen-scarer gets periodically injected with blasts of expensive CGI.
Dani’s particular psychic mutation causes everyone’s traumatic memories to turn into living nightmare creatures: There’s a fat Jesuit priest with a branding iron, a fire-breathing bear the size of a tractor trailer and a couple of skeletal bald guys with mouths like angler fish to chase people through the institution’s hallways. Unfortunately, the monster cameos are less terrifying than puzzling, as if guests from a nearby costume party wandered onto the film set. Though the film’s tone is painfully serious, the dialogue is occasionally accidentally funny. Says Dr. Reyes: “I’m a doctor. I come from a family of doctors. My mother was a vet.”
For those curious about the X-Men franchise (this is supposedly the final iteration) we hear, vaguely, of Professor X’s mutant academy, though the relationship to the X-Men universe is tenuous. If this were a pilot for a TV series, home audiences might be willing to baby it along until it grows stronger. As a stand-alone movie, this particular mutation looks like a badly-adapted dead-end.
The New Mutants. Directed by Josh Boone. Written by Josh Boone and Knate Lee. Starring: Blu Hunt, Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga and Alice Braga. The New Mutants can be seen in theatres including the Cineplex Varsity, Scotia Theatre and Cineplex Yonge-Dundas.