By Sandra Hall
THE NEW MUTANTS ★★½
(M) 94 minutes
The New Mutants is a haunted house movie featuring a bustling company of monsters and demons competing with one another to take out a quintet of trainee superheroes. But the offscreen misadventures of the film add up to a Hollywood horror story that eclipses anything served up by its special effects team.
Anya Taylor-Joy as Illyana Rasputin is one of the few bright spots in The New Mutants.
It was shot more than three years ago with a script based on an offbeat strand in the X-Men comic book saga and given a gothic twist enhanced with a hearty helping of adolescent angst. The film’s young superheroes-in-the-making have a full catalogue of childhood traumas to attend to before they can take command of their special powers and deal with their troubles.
Director and co-writer Josh Boone envisaged their exploits as a mash-up of Marvel, Stephen King and a John Hughes teen movie, and back in 2018 he cherished hopes of turning the movie into the beginnings of a trilogy. Instead, it ran into a succession of delays, becoming entangled in the complications following Disney’s takeover of Fox. And its prospects were not enhanced by the box-office failure of the last X-Men movie, The Dark Phoenix. Then came the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns.
In between, came much hand-wringing, a series of test screenings and a lot of indecision, all of which usually spell doom for a movie. And its opening box-office figures have been lacklustre.
On the plus side, the cast list is a roll-call of up-and-coming talents led by Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams as Rhane, whose ability to turn herself into a wolf did not sit well with the religious zealots in the Scottish village where she grew up. But Anya Taylor-Joy, recently seen as Emma in Autumn de Wilde’s light-hearted adaptation the Jane Austen’s novel, is the standout. She plays a sorceress from Siberia who slips naturally into the role of the house’s mean girl while relishing the chance to have a little fun with her Russian accent.
But the thrills are few despite the grimness of the decor, the crowd of lurid creatures jostling for your attention and the mystery surrounding the identity of the corporation running the place. For a few minutes, the group entertain the illusion they’re going to graduate from their training to become X-Men but Alice Braga, as the group’s minder, soon puts paid to such optimism, giving the game away when she comes up with that reassuring old line, “Trust me a doctor”.
The climax is more of an anti-climax despite the relay team of horrors leaping out of every corner and filling the halls. In the end, it adds up to an old-fashioned B-picture bereft of the rousing jolt of bad taste that gave the genre its energy.