Cinemutants - The New Mutants (2020)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2020, it’s The New Mutants. After a disaster that destroys her home, Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up in an abandoned hospital run by Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), who is attempting to rehabilitate a group of dangerous young mutants. Dani befriends Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams) before they discover that something in the hospital is trying to kill them and the other mutants – Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga) and Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton).

1. Prepping us to be X-Men. I almost forgot about The New Mutants. I thought I’d miscounted my weeks when I saw Deadpool & Wolverine was still a week away. But I’d only seen New Mutants once, at home, three years ago, and while I felt wildly underwhelmed the first time, I felt a little bit sad that the X-franchise ended while on the verge of really trying something new. Not unlike the creative shot in the arm given when Chris Claremont introduced the team in 1982 (seven years into his run), The New Mutants felt a bit like we might finally stray away from the core team and explore other mutant characters, with a brand-new antagonist to tie both teams together in the end. But The New Mutants underperformed, Disney bought the franchise, and this one went from bold new beginning to forgotten coda, shelved and reshot for three years before a quiet mid-pandemic release. For a brief moment, the marketing for the film boasted that it was actually an entry in the MCU, but Marvel and Disney were quick to refute that claim.
2. Sum en limbo omnipotens. The casting in The New Mutants is mostly serviceable, with Hunt and Williams showing a remarkable amount of chemistry despite never quite feeling like their comics counterparts, Mirage and Wolfsbane. Yet Anya Taylor-Joy positively crackles as Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, the sister of Colossus. This iteration of Magik has a severe chip on her shoulder and a predilection for less-than-PC dialogue, but especially by the third act, when Magik cuts loose with her Soulsword and her dragon familiar Lockheed (previously and cleverly depicted as a hand puppet), one sorely regrets that we didn’t get more movies with her. (Whether she’s the sister of the Colossus we meet in Deadpool is one more mystery left sadly on the shelf.) She’s one casting holdover I would welcome into the MCU (or even a quick cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine), but I’m certain we’ll see genre darling Anya Taylor-Joy in some Marvel role before long.
3. A sinister future (reprise). It seems almost appropriate that trickster diva Mister Sinister gets yet another anticipatory tease that never materialized. An early draft of the film had Storm running the hospital in Professor X’s stead, and the final film certainly wants us to think that the X-Men are involved until a second-act reveal. Since New Mutants was filmed around the same time as Apocalypse and then deferred until after Deadpool 2, it’s little surprise to learn that the shady hospital is one more arm of the Essex Corporation, a fact neatly foreshadowed by Dr. Reyes’s diamond-shaped lapel pin. We also see Dr. Reyes pack a vial of blood into a suitcase just like the one we saw in the post-credits scene of Apocalypse. And for eagle-eyed viewers, we get a quick glimpse of footage from the child experiments in Logan, suggesting that Sinister might even have had his fingers in that scheme. (It muddles the timeline a bit, unless The New Mutants is set after Logan’s death, at which time there weren’t supposed to be any new mutants.) With the Essex House in Deadpool 2 taking in wayward mutants, it was all building to a big showdown with Mister Sinister, the unseen architect of the New Mutants’ pain.
4. So, we’re free? The film ends (spoiler warning?) with the New Mutants leaving the hospital, beginning a twenty-mile trek back to civilization. Evidently, this film was to be the first in a trilogy integrating the New Mutants into the X-franchise writ large, with a second film bringing them into contact with Warlock and the Technarchy, an alien race of techno-organic mutants. (We’d probably also have seen Doug “Cypher” Ramsey, a frequent partner and translator for Warlock.) By the third film, Mister Sinister would have made his proper debut, putting the mutant world through a film version of the “Inferno” crossover, which brought demons and the Goblin Queen into conflict with the X-Men. It’s hard not to imagine this Inferno as a kind of X-Men: Endgame, uniting the disparate subfranchises, but it might just as easily have become another Days of Future Past, struggling (in vain) to make sense of a newly-muddled timeline. Disney’s purchase of Fox, and the advent of a forthcoming Mutant Saga, put all those plans to bed. But still, it ain’t over until the TVA sings...
5. Checking in with the MCU. I don’t have too much more to say about The New Mutants, other than to wonder what might have happened if this film’s horror vibe were to run afoul of the Shadow King on Legion, a mutant-adjacent show that played with genre much more successfully. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of new mutant round-up. By my count, the MCU has brought us four, with only one living in the main universe of the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. We’ve got Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) as the first confirmed mutant, with some ambiguity about whether Namor (Tenoch Huerta) from Wakanda Forever is also a mutant. (He is in the comics, but I don’t recall the movie weighing in.) On parallel worlds, we’ve met versions of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and a Binary version of Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch). While those three are probably being saved for a forthcoming Avengers multiversal film, I’d wager that any of them is fair game for Deadpool & Wolverine – depending on where Monica Rambeau landed in her fall through parallel worlds at the end of The Marvels. And of course, doors open from both sides, so who will Deadpool bring with him when he makes his way to Earth-616?

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did you ever see The New Mutants? If so, what do you remember about it? Up next, we’ll all see Deadpool & Wolverine for the first time. LFG, indeed.

Glass (2019)

I was an early believer on Unbreakable – I can still vividly recall the ads in comic books of the time heralding the fact that Alex Ross had created artwork for the DVD release. In that sense, I have always already been the perfectly calibrated audience for Shyamalan’s fascination with superheroes; I’ve been in the trenches of fandom with him this whole time, and I’ve come back to Unbreakable from time to time as I get older and deeper into the genre. Even as Shyamalan’s career has met with less than stellar reception, most of us have wondered when he’d do a sequel to his one superhero movie, especially as the genre became billion-dollar business.

No one expected him to backdoor his way into the terrain through his split-personality abduction horror film Split – spoilers, it’s a sequel to Unbreakable – but if that’s the way we get to Glass, so be it. It’s been nineteen years (much ado is made within the film itself) as David Dunn (Bruce Willis) continues to do the superhero thing, with his vigilante eyes set on serial killer Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy). Meanwhile, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) languishes in a mental institution under the care of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who believes that “Mister Glass” suffers from psychotic delusions.

As much as I felt weirdly cheated by the fact that Split was a covert sequel to Unbreakable, a misplaced and almost perfunctory twist, there’s an undeniable frisson of delight in seeing Willis, McAvoy, and Jackson on screen together, as if you can hear Shyamalan giggling from behind the camera, “Can you believe they let me get away with this?” And despite the crossover factor being markedly less ambitious than, say, Avengers: Infinity War, Glass manages to scratch that same itch, especially when all three are together. (Shyamalan’s cameo, in which he appears to claim that at least three of his cameos have all been the same man, is perhaps a bridge too far, but even there we find something mildly admirable in his overreach.)

To repeat what I said above, I had an acute sense during Glass that it was a movie designed to target my specific brand of fandom – my intense devotion to the genre and the way it helps us imagine and re-envision ourselves as the heroes we need. It stars three actors who I adore, turning in varying levels of exquisite performance. Willis continues, admittedly, to phone it in a bit, but as David Dunn I have the sense that Willis doesn’t actively resent being in the film (as was apparent in, for one, Cop Out). David has always been a more contemplative, quiet hero type, so it’s fine that Willis leaves the flashier performances to the film’s antagonists – itself a kind of genre-based decision. McAvoy was riveting in Split, but in Glass he revs up his performance by transitioning between personalities without the aid of costume changes. Far and away, though, as the title presages, the film belongs to the magisterial talents of Samuel L. Jackson, who gleefully carves the scenery and boxes up the rest to take home for later. Delivering impassioned monologues with eyes gleaming with fiery madness, Jackson is equally compelling in the moments when he’s not talking, as we try to divine what’s going on behind his silence. At home in both a hospital gown and his more ostentatious purple leather suit, Mister Glass is the kind of villain on which a franchise can properly be hung.

At the same time, and as much as I found myself digging the mythopoetic jazz Shyamalan is laying down with the genre, I understand entirely that the film isn’t for everyone, that Glass’s mixed-to-negative reviews are not quite unfair. As superhero films go, this is one of the talkier ones, and its genre deconstruction isn’t perhaps as revelatory as Shyamalan hopes (though it might have been nineteen years ago). Moreover, Shyamalan’s proclivity for “twists” in his storytelling stacks up in the film’s third act, with nearly as many false endings as the third Lord of the Rings movie, and though not all of these twists land with the mind-blowing effect of The Sixth Sense’s final developments, Shyamalan ultimately arrives at a place where I felt – if not accepting – at least understanding what he had tried to accomplish. Despite the broad ambitions of its morality play, the film’s scale is exceedingly intimate, but in those moments Shyamalan displays that he has lost none of his dexterity with miniature moments of terror, of the bumps-in-the-night scares on which he made his name with The Sixth Sense and Signs (which I recall, on the strengths of its sound mixing alone, being immensely terrifying in a dark room). 

If The Visit was Shyamalan’s low-budget back-to-basics return, with Split edging his way toward his earlier successes, it’s hard not to hope that Glass marks a sort of new beginning for a man whose career langured in critical limbo and popular dismissal. While this may not be the sort of superhero film for everyone, its methodical deliberateness is exactly my cup of tea and a useful counterprogramming if you’re feeling a bit worn by the blockbusters of the genre. Glass is so delightfully idiosyncratic that it’s all too easy to be swept along by the steady, purposeful drive of the story.

Glass is rated PG-13 for “violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.” Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Monday at the Movies - December 11, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, I’m a year late to the Split party, but imagine how the rest of the audience felt when they wound up sixteen years late to the party. Caution: spoilers for Split do follow.

Split (2016) – M. Night Shyamalan is a figure of some controversy, the bulk of whose oeuvre Wikipedia aptly describes as “poorly received but sometimes financially successful.” Split was reviewed by many as the debut of late Shyamalan, a slight return to form and a turn toward a more prosperous cinematic career. Split is, to be fair, leaps and bounds better than much of Shyamalan’s recent work, but – in the words of Mark Kermode – “so is, y’know, slamming your hand in a car door.” Split features a rightly well-regarded performance by James McAvoy as Kevin, possessed as he is by 24 personalities, some of which drive him to abduct a trio of vulnerable teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula) for sinister, mysterious purposes. The film is largely competent and even occasionally terrifying as the girls are menaced by McAvoy’s multiple personalities; McAvoy does a remarkable job creating personas recognizable by different distortions of the same face even before he speaks in a variety of intonations, and Shyamalan has found three actresses very effective at bearing the burden of the film’s horror. The film’s climax, though, felt a bit of a letdown as the plot quite literally runs away after making what might be a condescending interpretation of self-harm before pulling a Prometheus and deferring the story’s end for a future installment; the truth about Kevin is apparently revealed (though not much else is resolved, and even that’s up for a spot of interpretation).  But Shyamalan makes a bizarre decision when his final scene casts the entire film as a sequel to Unbreakable (2000). It’s a peculiar way to build a franchise, and indeed a third film – Glass – is evidently due in 2019 to unite the two disparate films, but it does feel that Shyamalan has traded an ending for a reminder of what might have been his last great film. Come for McAvoy’s compelling performance, but leave with a peculiar taste in your mouth as the film ends with a few bewildering creative calls. Having said that, though, I’m always up for more Unbreakable.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!