The New Mutants (2020)
There is something new to fear.
Can you imagine a world with mutants? One where potentially ordinary people could be harboring abilities far beyond that of an ordinary person? So far beyond that they might not even be able to control these remarkable capabilities? The premise of X-Men is actually quite a spooky one, even if it chooses more to focus on the more social aspects like racism and the likes in a commentary sort over the horror, and most of it’s moving visual media tends to just focus on flashy screen time and action scenes. Tonight’s movie dared to be different from the other movies though, tonight’s movie pitches itself as a horror movie - and when you layer on “just what could scare mutants so much it could be considered a horror movie” it becomes a very tempting thing to watch - so let’s dive into it and see just who are The New Mutants.
Woken up in the middle of the night by her father, a young girl is rushed from her house and out into the woods before going back to help others. Terrified, the girl waits until her father is thrown before her hiding spot by something we never see. She does what any terrified person would - she runs until she falls down a hill and clonks her head on a rock knocking her out. With setup out of the way, she wakes up in a hospital like situation - a very sparse, empty hospital like situation with heavy locks on the doors. We’ll come to find that she’s in an institute for new mutants, ones who’ve just hit that ripe time where it’s discovered they have powers and the institute is there to figure out just what those powers are and help them come to terms with them so they won’t be a danger to themselves and others. We get a whole breakfast club cast of these little troublemakers, each with their own demons and personalities - and then the bad things start happening. Horrible nightmares that eventually seem that they aren’t as escapable dream as one would think. At the peak of the danger, a secret gets discovered about the institute to further complicate the chances of survival. Can any of these kids make it out alive?
The plot actually works pretty good, especially with the pacing. Yes, I would have called it more of a drama then an action movie, considering the only real action per say is the final act, but I’m not in charge of genre tagging. It can feel a bit slow, but honestly the best thing I can think of to describe it is if you took The Breakfast Club and turned it into a horror movie (like, an actual horror movie not a slasher one). It works pretty well - not that fans of the source material won’t most likely figure out just what’s going on with it (the one I watched it with was more interested in what they were going to do with it as far as sticking to the material then they were wondering what was going on). Still, as we can guess already I’m not huge on the source material anyways, so it was all relatively fresh for me and I could just be an “unassuming audience member” along for the ride. The big thing for the plot though, is with all the drama and slices of horror going on as it slowly stalks forward it really relies on acting to keep you invested.
The actors, thankfully, aren’t bad. Yeah, there could be a line or two or interaction that could be perhaps a bit higher-grade, but in all honesty it works fine. Even the worst moment of acting isn’t bad enough to really turn it into a groaner, so even if you aren’t constantly being wowed it works really well for getting across what they want to. Some little jokes or lines can get a chuckle out of you, others can make you hide your face in your hand. When it gets to things being spooky, people seem to act in spades and sell it quite solidly. The cast contains at least a few faces you’ll recognize, perhaps one or two that will nag at the back of your mind for a little while until you realize what you’ve seen them in, and maybe one or two that you don’t really recognize at all. As a whole, there really isn’t a lot of actors here - mainly the group of kids and the singular adult. This does mean that some of the typical horror conventions - like a large body count - aren’t there to make you feel as worried for the characters you may or may not attach to, but it doesn’t stop them from really diving into the teen-style movie tropes like romance and clashing egos either.
Explosive start to the new.
The set is nice, but it also has that weird thing that most normal modern costumes do - you just don’t think about it. You don’t question it’s design or really think about it at all. In it’s own right, it’s really good given how believable that makes it, but at the same time it never really crosses your mind that “man, this set is actually really well setup to make this feel like a living place that’s being used for what it’s being used for”. On the more negative side of things, you could say that maybe it feels a little… sparse. Part of it might come from the low cast count in the size of building that it is, but it can at times feel like maybe there was a little budget constraint here or there - granted the other effects work washes that thought away in my opinion, and the relative emptiness of the setting helps with the horror elements of isolation, so it’s not really all that much of a negative. Sometimes, you just need to reach for something so it doesn’t sound like you think it’s the best movie ever, you know?
Those other effects are pretty rad as well. Sure, some might be as mundane as hand puppet dragon, but other ones (such as the mutant powers) are pretty dang rad looking. Fires, bears, portals, armors and swords, blasting off surrounded in energy and vibrations - even being a dog. It all looks quite well, even if at times it can be a bit comical with how it’s presented. Granted, that only happens maybe twice, most the time it’s by and large meant for either heroic purposes or horror purposes, and the mood around it is somewhat fitting of that. This is usually where I’d say something like “some are worse than others”, but really it feels like they all got the same level of polish, it’s just that some things - like traveling through portals - are cooler than others - like turning into a cannonball. They do all blend quite nicely in the finale, where it turns into a big old action fest though - but they also don’t really feel all that overused. It’s a nice balance really.
Audio is balanced well and you won’t have problem hearing things. Line deliveries are good, and as typical for my movie watching experience, the music is gone from my head after the movie was done but it did well to help emphasize if a scene was happy or horror at the time. Some of the dialogue can feel a bit stiff - less so from the acting in my opinion and more from the writing. I think of this much in the manner that there’s no way in the prequel trilogy to deliver the famous lines about hating sand without it sounding horrible because the writing - or lines themselves - are just dumb. There’s moments in the movie that, despite a line being entertaining, it can feel pretty dumb. It doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but considering the number of reviews that said it had “horrible writing and acting” I’m guessing this is something that did bother others who haven’t sat through some of the movies I have - and I haven’t even gotten to the particularly bad ones yet!
X team?
The New Mutants was a fresh take on the X-Men property that I can really get behind. In a franchise with so many different available powers and ways they could be spun, I’d love to see more things like this - and you’ve seen it to some extent with the comedy-centric Deadpool, the horror-take on Superman Brightburn, or even the found-footage attempt Chronicle. It’s so easy for someone like me to burn out on the whole superhero genre, but these little twists for the formula can go a long way - nobody here is a hero, it’s just a bunch of kids with abilities that are out of their control (well, mostly). It works great on multiple levels for the horror genre they decided to go with, and if “spooky mutant Breakfast Club” sounds good to you, you might just find yourself renting this one.