Movie Review: X-men Apocalypse

For a two and a half hour movie, I felt like I’d been sitting in that theatre for days. I would remark on the combination of comic to film and how that adaptation went, but Bryan Singer really didn’t seem to reference the comic book as source material, but as a way to make more flashy sequences and misuse one gloriously shirtless Hugh Jackman.

The story, and I use the word loosely, is based on some age-old mutant, Apocalypse, inadvertently being awakened and wreaking havoc all over the world. There are so many areas of the movie that meandered through thick junks of action and made it seem pointless at the same time. Unlike The Nice Guys, this movie seemed to be moving slower than it seemed possible. The movie combined a few different storylines into as small a space as possible. There were snippets of great filmmaking, the sequence with Evan Peters running through the school to save people while ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of These.’ That was pretty much the highlight of the entire movie for me, aside from the aforementioned shirtless Hugh Jackman.

The acting was passable, but even the big names, Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy didn’t seem to want to be there. Michael Fassbender and Nicholas Hoult carried their scenes well, until the fighting started, then everyone was pretty much the same. The kid who played Nightcrawler was entertaining, but the conflict of the character was swapped out for bizarre humour that doesn’t fit the character. Olivia Munn was great as Psylocke, but had all of three lines. The girl who played Storm was also good, but her character seemed overly one-dimensional until the very end. The idea that Magneto would follow Apocalypse, no matter what tragedy he’d endured, is wholly implausible. Magneto does not follow, he leads.

This is how I felt after watching this travesty of a movie.

The movie was cramped and the story, in the end, made no sense. It seemed obvious that the movie was made to make money, not to tell a story or further the X-men lore. Why is it that Marvel can get Avengers so right but can’t seem to make one quality X-men movie since the first one where the world was introduced to Hugh Jackman, the quintessential Wolverine? I really mulled this over as I watched the movie, as watching the movie had no value. There are big actors/big names in both franchises. The scope of each character and each story is beautifully rendered in Avengers, even with small-time characters like Ant-man. With X-men, they take on the whole instead of looking at the pieces. I wonder if X-men would be better served by showing how the team works alone before it can work together, even if that isn’t how it was originally written. At this point, they are taking such artistic license that is shouldn’t really matter what they do now. Is it bad that I want them to reboot the series again?

X-men Apocalypse disappointed me on so many levels. The dialogue felt forced, the cast didn’t seem to want to be there and appeared to be not enjoying themselves. I should have known better and I regret having wasted my time and money to see this joke of a movie.