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.

Cinemutants - Dark Phoenix (2019)

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 2019, it’s Dark Phoenix. A daring rescue mission in space brings Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) into contact with the mysterious Phoenix entity, a powerful force that has the power to destroy or recreate the universe. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) leads the X-Men in trying to help their teammate, while a shapeshifting alien (Jessica Chastain) pursues the Phoenix for her own ends.

1. Last of the First Class. Dark Phoenix is entirely aware of its position as the grand finale for the Fox X-Men films, and more particularly for the sub-franchise that began in 2011 with First Class. Set now in the early 1990s, it becomes increasingly impossible to believe that these characters have aged 30 years; Michael Fassbender’s Magneto wears a few wrinkles around his eyes, but everyone else seems a spry early-30s rather than approaching (at minimum) 50. It feels as though the movie can’t introduce much in the way of new material, stuck as it is with characters like Storm, Nightcrawler, and Quicksilver, who don’t have much at all to do in the plot. Instead, the movie knows it’s an ending, and so it ties up as many plot threads as it can; mutants live, mutants die, and Xavier and Magneto play one more game of chess as the credits roll.
2. X-Women. In the eight years since First Class, Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar, helmed her own Hunger Games franchise, and became the highest-paid actress in the world. Consequently, her presence here feels continuously compulsory, and you can practically hear her breathe a sigh of relief when (spoiler warning) Mystique dies early in the second act. Her leadership of the X-Men is an intriguing prospect, a far cry from the source material, but it comes with the grievously on-the-nose dialogue about changing the team name to “X-Women.” Granted, the women have almost always been the best developed characters, particularly under the pen of Chris Claremont (who cameos here), but the sentiment drew a derisive laugh in the theaters. Mystique says it to be profound and defiant, but Deadpool had, only a year earlier, made satirical mincemeat of the gendered team name. It’s a weird note, then, on which to start a movie about the X-Men’s most powerful woman.
3. You are not broken. I’ll say this for Dark Phoenix; as boring and underbaked as the movie is, Sophie Turner is never quite bad in it. With a different script, she might have been a Phoenix for the ages, but this movie feels like another speedrun through the X-Men’s most iconic storyline. Where it took Chris Claremont four years and around 40 issues, both The Last Stand and Dark Phoenix try to knock it out under two hours. I have no doubt that the MCU will eventually, inevitably, take one last swing at “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” but my biggest advice would be to slow down, give the story room to breathe, and develop it as a proper three-act tragedy that impacts the universe, not just Jean’s boyfriend Cyclops. Given that Turner never got to be reborn as the Phoenix, it would be nice to see her once more in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I rather doubt it; with Hugh Jackman in tow, a cameo from Famke Janssen seems much more likely.
4. Gap. Although no one really believed him, Hans Zimmer claimed to have retired from superhero movies after Batman v Superman. A scant three years later, he was back for Dark Phoenix, and thank goodness, because he’s one of the only performers who doesn’t seem bored. Indeed, Zimmer’s score elevates the picture and ends up being a fantastic listen when divorced from the film. (I should know, considering how often I’ve got Zimmer playing around me!) Case in point, in one of the film’s major action sequences, the X-Men struggle to cross the street, but Zimmer plays it like the definitional conflict of an era. The film’s final battle sequence, aboard a speeding train, is a little stronger, even as Zimmer continues to shred at eleven, all pounding percussion and swooping melodies. Like so many casting decisions and plot points in this franchise, one wonders what Zimmer could have done with a truly terrific film around him. If nothing else, one of the best comic book worlds now has a Hans Zimmer theme to hum while you read the latest issue.
5. A new beginning. One almost feels a pang of regret as Dark Phoenix ends. The film’s final moments propose a few interesting ideas, including Hank McCoy as headmaster of the newly-formed Jean Grey School. But with the very first movie set in 2000 or thereabouts and Dark Phoenix landing in 1992, the film’s erstwhile prequel premise became a sort of asymptote, approaching and imitating the original films but never quite lining up with them. So we’ll never find out, for example, whether “Stewart or McAvoy?!” was Deadpool’s Professor Xavier or what became of Weapon X Wolverine after his Apocalypse cameo (or will we?). And while the film’s final frames imply that Jean’s still out there as the Phoenix, there’s no post-credits scene and no indication that Disney intends to do much of anything with the First Class timeline. Before the TVA arrives, we can safely consider this timeline pruned.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did the First Class timeline overstay its welcome, or should the Phoenix rise one more time? Up next, you might have forgotten that Dark Phoenix wasn’t actually the last Fox-verse film. You can’t be blamed, because I never formally reviewed The New Mutants... until next week.

Cinemutants - Deadpool 2 (2018)

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 2018, it’s Deadpool 2. After a personal tragedy, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) finally enlists with the X-Men before running afoul of the time traveler Cable (Josh Brolin), who has come from the future to stop a killer before he murders Cable’s family. With his methods meeting the disapproval of Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Deadpool decides to form his own team – the X-Force.

1. F#@% Wolverine. Deadpool 2 opens with a music box reenacting Wolverine’s death at the end of Logan, and watching the two movies nearly back-to-back was especially entertaining. If this Deadpool is aware that (a) Wolverine has died, it’ll be intriguing to see how he reacts to working with another Logan from another world. And where the first Deadpool film poked gentle fun at Hugh Jackman, Deadpool 2 primes their inevitable team-up with a post-credits gag in the Super Duper Extended Cut. In the theatrical cut, Deadpool shoots the Wade Wilson from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the extended cut gives him more dialogue: “Look, eventually, you’re going to hang up the claws, and it’s gonna make a lot of people very sad. But one day, your old pal Wade’s gonna ask you to get back in the saddle again. And when he does, say yes.” Oddly prescient? Or just throwing down the gauntlet? In the way that the first film’s post-credits name-checked Cable, this one feels like Deadpool marking his territory (a pun I’m sure he would appreciate).
2. Just cleaning up the timelines. After swiping and repairing Cable’s time-travel device, Deadpool goes around time-hopping (or, as they call it in the comics, “body-sliding”), saving Vanessa’s life while killing Ryan Reynolds circa 2011. (In the Super Duper cut, he also pays a visit to baby Hitler.) With the TVA playing a role in the trailers, I can’t believe this flagrant continuity manipulation won’t be an issue for them. On the flip side, we reunite with two mutants in the post-Days of Future Past timeline – Yukio (Shioli Kutsana) and the Juggernaut (an uncredited and CGI-assisted Ryan Reynolds). Before this rewatch, I’d entirely forgotten that this is our second franchise Yukio, and in fairness it’s entirely possible this is a different Yukio from The Wolverine’s Rila Fukushima. (This one has an electrified whip, not precognition.) Still, it might be fun to see both Yukios on screen in a few weeks. Meanwhile, this Juggernaut is a fair case of “less is more”; rather than spout dated internet memes, this Juggernaut is a marked improvement, all force and demolition just for the hell of it. 
3. Our group will be forward-thinking. One of Deadpool 2’s best jokes is even funnier given how much the trailers played up the existence of X-Force. Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, Vanisher – the trailer made it look like these C-listers would be headlining the film, and in a world where Groot made a billion dollars, it wasn’t inconceivable. So to watch nearly all of them die horrible, grisly deaths to the spiraling guitar licks of “Thunderstruck” is still outrageously funny. It’s unlikely Marvel will get around to many (if any) of these characters; though the surviving Domino (Zazie Beetz) hasn’t been announced yet for Deadpool & Wolverine, I’d be amazed if she’s not involved. While the film teases that the whole thing was franchise bait for Josh Brolin’s multi-film contract, I do recall some buzz about a proper X-Force film before Disney bought the store. (Meanwhile, Deadpool cracks a joke that both anticipates and deflates a major beat from next week’s film. Like and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss that post.)
4. Essex House. Another film, another Mister Sinister tease that never materialized. The crux of the film centers around the violent mutant rehabilitation at the Essex House, run by Eddie Marsan’s sadistic and nameless Headmaster. Marsan isn’t playing Sinister, whose real name is Nathaniel Essex, but his gene therapy/torture at a home for wayward mutants is exactly the kind of scheme that might embroil Marvel’s leading eugenicist. This Sinister tease also plants the seeds for a deeper interconnectedness that never came to pass; having already seen Essex goons steal Wolverine’s DNA, and with one more Sinister tease yet to come (but left, as I recall, on the cutting room floor), this film posits the Essex House as a kind of anti-Xavier’s academy, with Domino realizing that she was raised in this selfsame orphanage. (There’s even a pointed cameo from Luke Roessler, who plays the young David Haller on Legion, implying a backdoor connection with the TV series.) Was Mister Sinister poised to be the next big baddie of the X-Men franchise, with a fertile story reason to introduce, oh, perhaps some “new mutants’?
5. Zip it, Thanos! As I watched Josh Brolin play Cable (perfect casting, really, even as the movie hangs a lantern on the difference in stature), I flashed back to all the doubling and recasts we’ve seen in the MCU so far. Gemma Chan, Alfre Woodard, Patton Oswalt, Michelle Yeoh... and that’s not even counting folks like Tara Strong who’ve voiced multiple roles. Is it inconceivable that Brolin – notorious for playing franchise archvillain Thanos – might reprise the part of Cable once the mutants make the jump to Marvel proper? Deadpool’s already made “the” joke, and Thanos being fully CGI probably helps; plus, the older Cable gets, the more the character works in opposition to meeting his parents in his past (spoilers, he’s Nathan Summers, the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). You could even have some fun with the fact that he’s a refugee from a dead timeline; his present no longer exists, especially if the Fox timeline is walled off, destroyed, or pruned at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine. At the very least, it’d be a shame not to see him one last time, given that he’s heretofore unaware that Deadpool repaired (and abused) his technology. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: what’s a Deadpool to do when the TVA turns up at his door? Up next, the phoenix rises one more time for an X-sunset, a metaphor that’s holding together about as well as the rest of Dark Phoenix.

Cinemutants - Logan (2017)

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 2017, it’s Logan. In the near future, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has retired, caring for an aging, ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). But Logan too is plagued with a sluggish healing factor, declining eyesight, and the world-weariness of a man who wants to die but still cannot. Though mutants haven’t been born in years, a young girl (Dafne Keen) arrives in Logan’s life with what appears to be his exact power set. 

1. The man comes around. Logan is such a good movie that I was, I’ll confess, a little disappointed when I heard that Hugh Jackman was returning for Deadpool & Wolverine. Jackman and director James Mangold were explicit about Logan being the grand finale for the character, and as good as The Wolverine was, Logan is leaps better. It barely feels like a superhero movie, and you know I mean that without any sense of self-loathing; it feels like a film about these characters, what makes them tick, and what proves to be their undoing. Jackman embodies all the contradictions of an aging, dying Logan, still possessed of his compassion and his rage in equal parts. The movie Shane gets invoked, which might be too cute by half, but as a trilogy, we’ve seen Logan as superhero, ronin, and now gunslinger. Through it all, Jackman has always found something consistent in the character, some core emotional truth that made him one of the best there is at what he does.
2. Something unspeakable. Logan is Jackman’s show, but it’s very nearly a two-hander with Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier. (We also get Stephen Merchant as a very different Caliban from the one we met in Apocalypse.) Now in his nineties, this Xavier is heartbreaking, tortured by his failing body and the death of his dream for mutantkind. It’s also quite possibly Stewart’s best and most human performance as the erstwhile leader of the X-Men; no longer just a symbol, this Xavier is wholly mortal and deeply fallible, yet there’s still a glimmer of the school’s founder when he reminds Logan, “Someone has come along.” In another emotionally devastating beat, he refutes Logan’s overwhelming cynicism with a reminder, “It is [real] for Laura,” accidentally expressing one of my core beliefs about what empowers comic book readers (which Laura happens to be). It’s unclear whether this is the end of the First Class timeline, an older timeline, or a completely detached epilogue outside of continuity (a la The Dark Knight Returns) – but nor does it really matter; this is one end of the road for these characters.
3. Both hunter and caregiver. Adding a kid sidekick can sometimes be the death knell for superhero stories, heralding the end of original stories or watering down the material for a younger generation. But Dafne Keen’s interpretation of Laura as part feral child, part lost childhood is so compelling that folks are still beating the drum for her to continue in the role of X-23. Possessing none of the pretentiousness or precociousness of many child performers, Keen holds her own opposite Jackman with a fully realized and deeply human presentation. She’s both denied and been cagey about reprising her role in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I think we’d all be tickled to see her don the yellow costume of her ersatz father. (The fact that she’s stayed close to the mouse’s fold, with a dynamite role in The Acolyte on Disney+, bodes well, I think.)
4. I believe you knew my father. Raise your hand if you’d forgotten that Richard E. Grant plays the villain in one of the best X-Men films. I do recall that when his casting was announced, folks logically assumed he’d be playing Mister Sinister, following on from the Apocalypse post-credit scene. While he would have been fantastic as the vamping, besotted mutant geneticist (and is perhaps now sadly too old for the role), there’s something equally powerful in the banality of Grant playing Zander Rice, whose father was one of the nameless scientists who gave Wolverine his adamantium claws back in 1979. It’s a nice touch that ties together a trilogy of Wolverine movies with almost no connecting tissue, and Grant brings a certain snarl and menace to a role that requires him to believe he’s acting in humanity’s best interest. I’d speculate that we might see Grant in a different role, perhaps as a comics-accurate Reverend Stryker, but then I remembered we already have Richard E. Grant in the MCU as the time-lost Old Loki.
5. Holding your own heart. I’m not breaking new ground with this one, and indeed apparently James Mangold has long since confirmed it. But watching Logan so close to The Wolverine alerted me to the truth in Yukio’s vision of Logan’s death: “I see you on your back. There’s blood everywhere. You’re holding your own heart in your hand.” Indeed, this Logan passes away, covered in blood, holding Laura’s hand, finally tasting something of the peace that Xavier had promised could come from having a family. It’s a perfect and fitting end for this character, and we all believed Hugh Jackman when he said it was the end of the road. Even with Patrick Stewart’s Doctor Strange cameo, I didn’t think a Wolverine variant was in the cards because of how well Jackman stuck the landing here, so now I’m more curious than ever to see what lured him out of retirement – and which Wolverine (and from whence) he’s bringing with him.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: should Logan have stayed dead? Or do you think the old bub still has one more in him? Up next, perhaps the most important film in this rewatch series, or maybe just one of the most fun. It’s Deadpool 2.

Cinemutants - X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

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 2016, it’s X-Men: Apocalypse. En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), the first mutant, awakens from millennia of slumber, determined to cleanse the world and start over. Meanwhile, tragedy strikes Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), driving Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) back into an alliance with Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), while a young Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) joins the Xavier Academy and begins to fall for the telepathic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner).

1. The third one’s always the worst. When Jean Grey speaks this line, ostensibly in reference to seeing Return of the Jedi, it’s clear that director Bryan Singer is taking one last dig at Brett Ratner’s The Last Stand. It’s only been a few weeks for us, but a decade later, Singer was still relitigating the old canon he wiped away in the previous film. It’s catty and distracting, especially because Apocalypse is more or less the third film in the First Class timeline, and it’s one of the franchise’s weaker outings. It’s less schizophrenic than The Last Stand, but it’s both undercooked and overbusy, with Oscar Isaac as a surprisingly unenthusiastic Apocalypse, who in another cinematic universe could very well be the biggest threat mutantkind has ever faced. But Isaac is clearly fatigued by the heavy prosthetics and needlessly dramatic dialogue (“You can fire your arrows from the Tower of Babel...”), and despite getting what should have been a fresh start from Days of Future Past, we seem to be treading the same boards all over again. If we get a mention in Deadpool & Wolverine, it’ll surely acknowledge the fact that Isaac has moved on with Marvel as Moon Knight.
2. She’s barely aged a day. Curiously, Apocalypse is set in 1983, but you would scarcely know it’s been 20 years since First Class. There are a few throwaway lines about how well everyone is aging – the kind of lantern-hanging that Deadpool might do best – but I thought it then and I thought it now: it was a wild choice to set the primary X-Men films in the historical past and then leave them there. No one looks twenty years older, and the only good reason to leave the films in the past is to keep the rock-solid casting of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, who still play this trilogy like one long break-up. Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, has “contractual obligation” hanging over her head in a role that sees her discard her blue appearance for nominal plot reasons but more for her own professional clout. And with the reprise of so many supporting characters instead of the legion (pun intended) of options from the comics, it all feels a little claustrophobic.
3. The glory of what’s to come. As much as Apocalypse tries to chart a new path using the same old pieces from the original films, there is certainly a sense of awe when Jean Grey finally unleashes the Phoenix Force in the final battle against Apocalypse. Seeded throughout the film in a way that never quite feels like an echo of X2, it’s an implicit promise that the next film will do justice to the “Dark Phoenix Saga” of comics legend. Whether we strike gold is a subject for debate in three weeks’ time, but almost no one enjoyed Dark Phoenix. Will the third time be a charm if we see a Phoenix in Deadpool & Wolverine? Heck, as a living embodiment of reincarnation, the Phoenix could be just the thing to bridge timelines from the Fox films into the MCU, or perhaps it’ll just be Deadpool’s sheer force of fourth-wall breaking.
4. Weapon X. After sixteen-plus years, Hugh Jackman had very nearly done it all with Wolverine, touching on virtually every one of the costumed hero’s most famous comic book stories. Yet his uncredited cameo (which I recall being a genuine surprise) brings to life Barry Windsor-Smith’s iconic “Weapon X” design, with Wolverine as a deprogrammed and feral Frankenstein’s monster. It’s the sort of visual shout-out that rewards comics readers, while looking breathlessly cool for the normies in the audience. It also gives us a peek at how Logan’s faring in the new timeline; last we saw him, Mystique-as-Stryker was fishing him out of the river, and now we see his origin story aligning away from what we learned in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with his brief interaction with Jean Grey retroactively cueing up his romantic fixation on her. Will the Logan we meet in Hugh Jackman have gotten his adamantium from Danny Huston or this film’s Josh Helman? Which one grows up to be Brian Cox? We may find out in a month’s time. 
5. A sinister future. We’ve still got about four weeks left on this recap series, but believe me when I tell you the end is nigh. Case in point, this post-credits teaser that never materialized, despite a pitch-perfect opportunity for the next film to include Mister Sinister, a genetics-obsessed madman whose Essex Corporation is seen here recovering a vial of Logan’s blood. Sinister’s fixation with the Summers bloodline, too, might have made for an interesting film down the line. Still, I hope the MCU is holding Sinister in reserve, and not just for a passing cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine; lest we forget, Sinister’s comics debut found him leading the charge in the “Mutant Massacre” crossover, and his more flamboyant recent appearances would be a perfect fit for, say, David Tennant. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is Apocalypse the biggest misstep in the X-Universe? Or is it an underrated gem? Up next, it’s swan songs all around with Logan.

Cinemutants - Deadpool (2016)

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 2016, it’s Deadpool. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) becomes the Merc With a Mouth after a mad experiment unlocks his mutant gene and makes him unkillable – and aware of the fourth wall, which he’s dead-set on breaking. After leaving Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), the love of his life, Deadpool is out for revenge against Ajax (Ed Skrein) – but not if the X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) can stop him.

1. It rhymes with “Pulverine.” Now that we’ve reset the timeline with Days of Future Past, the X-franchise remedies one of its greatest mistakes, giving Ryan Reynolds a second chance at the character that I would argue completely reshaped the trajectory of his career. Sarcastic and garrulous, potty-mouthed yet entirely affable, Reynolds might as well have been born to play Deadpool – this Deadpool, that is. And the film is unapologetically not in continuity with X-Men Origins: Wolverine; though this Wade Wilson is a former soldier of fortune, his mutant power isn’t unlocked until a first-act flashback, and there’s a sense that the X-Men have been aware of him for some time (more on that in a moment). All of this is incompatible with the mute assassin that was (spoilers) decapitated by Wolverine in the late 1970s of the earlier film – though, in one of the film’s better gags, Wade still possesses an action figure of this misguided adaptation. (We’ll revisit the prequel, quite literally, in the next Deadpool film.)
2. McAvoy or Stewart? While I thought this recap series might be a good lead-up to Deadpool & Wolverine, finding the little clues along the way like a deerstalker, what it’s done more is remind me of how murky and nonsensical the timeline(s) could be. (No wonder the TVA is getting involved.) As a serial fourth-wall breaker, Deadpool is perfectly placed to hang a lantern on the franchise’s flexible continuity, and his frequent knowing winks turn the audience into insiders who are ready to laugh along with jokes about Professor X’s performers and the low budget that kept us from getting a full-blown team of X-Men in this film. (“It's funny that I only ever see two of you. It's almost like the studio couldn't afford another X-Man.”) We can assume this movie takes place in the present day of the X-Universe, but whether it’s before the mansion coda to DoFP, in the future of the First Class universe, or just an entirely separate timeline... we might need to wait another month.
3. Language, please! When it was released, Deadpool was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, dethroning 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded. (It’s since been beaten by Deadpool 2, which was in turn trounced by 2019’s Joker. Oppenheimer currently holds the #2 spot, a joke which one might expect Deadpool to make in the upcoming sequel.) The comic book superhero genre had flirted with R-ratings – Blade and Watchmen spring to mind – but Deadpool proved how bankable a grown-up offering could be. And this film is indeed for grown-ups, replete with ultra-violence, creative profanity, and a smattering of nudity for good measure. (Kind of weird that it’s on Disney+, actually.) It’s hard to imagine watering down Deadpool for Disney’s MCU, but the trailers for Deadpool & Wolverine suggest he’ll flirt aggressively with the line – or rake in enough money to convince Disney that superheroes can swear even if they’re not in a James Gunn film.
4. We will make an X-Man of you yet. One of the most interesting throwaway lines of the film finds Colossus confessing that he has, more than once, invited Deadpool to join the X-Men. As serious as Xavier’s Academy has been presented thus far, it’s impossible to imagine Deadpool in the ranks, but it tells us so much about the cloyingly optimistic Colossus, a much-needed upgrade from his wallpaper-thin characterization in the previous films. Will we see Daniel Cudmore reprise his role, as he did in Days of Future Past? Or is Stefan Kapičić now the only Colossus in the multiverse? And of our budget-mandated two X-Men, Brianna Hildebrand is a terrific anti-Deadpool in Negasonic Teenage Warhead, whose mutant superpowers include “long sullen silences, followed by mean comments.” If she can ride the multiversal wave and join Kamala Khan in the MCU’s ‘first class,’ I will be outrageously happy.
5. Four or five moments. At an hour and forty-eight minutes, Deadpool is littered with rapid-fire jokes, throwaway one-liners, and brutal physical comedy. As many times as I’ve seen the film (and it has been a lot), I always find myself forgetting a handful of jokes until they accost me once again. I’d entirely forgotten, for example, that Stan Lee has a lascivious cameo in a strip club, or that Deadpool leaves his armaments in a taxicab just before the third act superhero showdown (a casualty of a budget shortfall that nevertheless ends up so much better than just your standard shootout). While the box office receipts suggest that audiences want a comics-accurate Deadpool over whatever happened in Origins, the real truth is that Deadpool is just a cosmic amount of fun in a tight, punchy package (hold your puns). 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is Deadpool the perfect Valentine’s Day film, or just the best X-Men film that doesn’t have Wolverine in it? Up next, Oscar Isaac gets in on the mutant fun with X-Men: Apocalypse, a movie that is certainly one of the X-Men films of all time.

Cinemutants - X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

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 2014, it’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to save their future from mutant-killing Sentinel robots. In 1973, Wolverine has to bring together a despondent Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and the incarcerated Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

1. Securing our future. We can argue about whether this is the best X-Men movie (it’s easily top three), but there’s no debating the fact that this is the most X-Men movie. Two casts, parallel timelines, ready-made comics inspiration, and a continuity fix that only muddles the waters even further: Days of Future Past has everything an X-fan could want. While the change-the-past plot was intended to smooth over any errors in the timeline (or, at least, provide a plausible excuse for them), it only exposes the gossamer of the plot to brutal scrutiny. By the end of the film, just how much of the past has Logan undone? (Director Bryan Singer is at least erasing The Last Stand, but there’s a wink toward expunging X-Men Origins: Wolverine, as well.) You might still need a chart to understand how all the films relate to each other, but I’ll argue next week that, as far as time travel and continuity are concerned, Days walked so Deadpool could run.
2. Infinite outcomes. Along with being the apex X-Men movie, Days of Future Past provides something so unique that only the superhero genre can do. As incredible as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan were, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender were equally inspired casting choices. And in virtually any other genre, you’d never have an opportunity to put them on-screen together; imagine a Godfather movie that saw Marlon Brando meet Robert De Niro, or a James Bond movie where Daniel Craig teams up with Pierce Brosnan. Another way Days cues up Deadpool is by implying that both versions exist out there somewhere, simultaneously; future films followed both Professors Xavier, and it’s inconceivable that Deadpool & Wolverine won’t see other iterations (or “variants,” in MCU-speak) of recognizable characters. Let’s hope the new castings are just as good. 
3. It all starts with her. In the comics, Kitty Pryde is the one traveling back in time to warn the X-Men about averting the future; here, though, it’s got to be Wolverine, both for the practical needs of the plot and for the fact that Hugh Jackman continues to be an audience favorite for his literal embodiment of the character. (The movie finds a creative way to keep Kitty relevant to the plot.) Meanwhile, the target of the future remains unchanged; it’s still Mystique, played by Jennifer Lawrence at the peak of her rising stardom. Two years after her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and a year before finishing her tenure in The Hunger Games, Lawrence makes a third-stringer background villain into a compelling and deeply human protagonist. It’s almost hard not to root for her, though Lawrence’s apparent fatigue with the role will become inescapable in the weeks to come. (A third woman, Anna Paquin’s Rogue, becomes an axis point in the “Rogue Cut,” which sees Rogue freed from a mutant prison to help Kitty Pryde save Wolverine.)
4. In the future, do I make it? It feels like it’s been true for most of these movies, but Days of Future Past really illuminates the paradox of accurately and lovingly bringing characters to life and then giving them absolutely nothing to do. Bishop and Blink, for example, look like they stepped straight out of a comic book, but I’d be darned to tell you why, on the strength of this movie, any fan would care about them. Even Storm suffers from this paradox; as cool as it is to see Halle Berry rocking the closest thing to a mohawk we got from her, Storm’s presence in the film is barely consequential, and the film seems not to have noticed that she is essentially the last surviving faculty member at the Xavier Academy. The X-Men might have the deepest bench in comics, but the movies always seemed to focus on the same dozen or so; next week, we’ll see Deadpool do right by Colossus, who’s had less personality than window dressing in these films.
5. Is the future truly set? Superhero storytelling is perpetually stuck in the second act; after you get through the first-act origin tales, most of these stories never truly end. (And when they do, like All-Star Superman or Old Man Logan, they’re in alternate realities.) Days of Future Past eats its cake and has it too by giving Logan a cheery send-off while also holding open the door for more stories in the First Class timeline. (Quite where Logan takes place, we’ll consider in a few weeks.) But it does seem a little suspicious – and possibly even sinister – that Bryan Singer’s happy ending seems to erase/retcon only the movies he didn’t direct. Of the beleaguered director’s many sins, this is far from the worst, but this film does seem to promise a new golden age that, more or less, never came to pass. Did the film that was meant to fix the franchise actually break it? The best films to come are the ones that play fastest and loosest with continuity...

Sound off in the comments, true believers: where does Days of Future Past sit in your estimations, and was it really ten years ago already? Up next, second chances all around when Ryan Reynolds gets another shot at the Merc with a Mouth in Deadpool.

Cinemutants - The Wolverine (2013)

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 2013, it’s The Wolverine. Years after The Last Stand, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is in exile, alone and haunted by the ghost of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Invited to Japan by the ailing Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), Logan finds himself entangled in a conspiracy involving Yashida’s son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), his granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto), and the precognitive mutant Yukio (Rila Fukushima). 

1. Eternity can be a curse. After thirteen years and six outings as Logan (counting his cameo last week), Hugh Jackman gives his best performance yet in The Wolverine. Wolverine has always been a creature of rage, and in this one we get to see that rage turned inward – for the first act, at least. Like any good soldier, Wolverine only needs a mission to turn himself around, something I suspect will come into play in Deadpool & Wolverine, when we meet another Logan broken by failure. But it’s not all heartbreak here, because Jackman also gives us some of the best action sequences with Wolverine, including a sensational fight on a bullet train and (in the extended cut) a lengthy battle with ninjas on motorbikes. And while Jackman is much taller than the Wolverine of the comics, he takes full advantage of that size difference and owns it in this movie.
2. Kuzuri. In the comics, Wolverine has a long history with Japan, having trained there before his days with the X-Men and drifting back every so often to settle some bit of unfinished business. The Wolverine relocates Logan’s history with Japan into his present, tying him in an arresting opener to the bombing of Nagasaki before setting the bulk of the film in Japan. There’s some question about whether Logan is a kuzuri (an animal) or a ronin (a samurai without a master), and there’s some room to wonder whether Yukio’s gift is a mutation or just a spiritual connection to the future. In some ways, this movie anticipates Peach Momoko’s recent work in the Marvel Universe, which reimagines mutants as yokai (cf., Demon Days, Ultimate X-Men). Done carefully, this cultural crossover enriches the character and keeps him from growing stale.
3. Everyone you love dies. The Wolverine plays with one of the most stalwart archetypal plots in superhero comics – take away everything recognizable about the hero, break him down to nothing, and build him back up. On a meta level, the film even acknowledges that The Last Stand and Origins didn’t go very well, and so we’re rooting for a redemption of the franchise and its erstwhile protagonist. First Class was a step in a new direction, but The Wolverine had the unenviable task of picking up from an unloved film and playing the X-ball where it lay. (Director James Mangold would tread a similar path with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a decade later, following on the unpopular Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) So we have a Logan without a team, without a purpose, and even without his healing factor. Who, then, is the Wolverine? It’s immensely satisfying once Logan embraces the mantle that had been used to taunt and torment him.
4. We don’t all have claws. While I don’t think too many people would thrill at the return of mutant poison mistress Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), I was reminded on this rewatch that we were really robbed of more Yukio. Rila Fukushima would get her superhero due playing Katana for a few years on Arrow, but The Wolverine set up a fun dynamic with Yukio as Logan’s backup, his confidant, and the closest thing to a friend he permits himself (almost reminiscent, incidentally, of the relationships Wolverine has had with young X-Men like Kitty Pryde and Jubilee). We meet a very different Yukio in Deadpool 2 – either due to time-travel shenanigans or just two people having the same name – and Days of Future Past will imply that this timeline doesn’t exist any longer. But since exiles from dead continuities are sort of the TVA’s whole thing, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this Yukio makes a return; someone who can see the future might come in handy if the TVA are pruning timelines. 
5. Ghosts of future past. I had entirely forgotten that Famke Janssen plays a not-insubstantial role in The Wolverine, which makes me wonder if we might see her pop up in the new Deadpool movie as some multiversal variant of the Phoenix (she stands a better chance, at least, than Sophie Turner, whose Dark Phoenix is less than fondly remembered). There’s certainly a sense of the unresolved in the relationship with Logan, as well as the question of whether she’s just a memory or a spectral vision from beyond. What I hadn’t forgotten, however, was the first-rate post-credits scene which reintroduces Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart into the mix; though we saw them three weeks ago, it had been seven years for moviegoers (not counting Stewart’s CGI cameo in Origins). This is one of those gold-standard teasers, and it had me wanting to cue up Days of Future Past immediately; we’ll have to wait a week for that one.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is The Wolverine overshadowed by other, better X-films? Case in point, we’ll do the time warp again next week with arguably the franchise’s finest hour, Days of Future Past. (And for those playing the home game, I’ll be watching “The Rogue Cut” this time around.)

Cinemutants - X-Men: First Class (2011)

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 2011, it’s X-Men: First Class. It’s 1962, and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is just beginning his research into mutation when he meets Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), a mutant out for revenge on Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the man who killed his mother. With Shaw manipulating both sides of the Cold War, Charles and Erik recruit a team of mutants, beginning with Charles’s childhood friend Raven (Jennifer Lawrence). 
 
And so we return and begin again. The reset button is practically a supporting character in the X-Men franchise, and after Origins didn’t quite recapture the magic, First Class goes back even further, both in the timeline and in reprising the actual opening scene of X-Men. (No wonder – it’s still one of the most effective origin stories and one of the best-told ones.) Director Matthew Vaughn is never too showy about the film’s 1962 setting, though a third-act retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis feels a bit like something that belongs in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. As a prequel, however, First Class is reveling in the untold stories, from Henry McCoy’s evolution into the blue-furred Beast (Nicholas Hoult) to Xavier’s occasional quips about losing his hair.
 
Frankenstein’s monster. A huge part of the success of First Class comes from its own secret origin, starting life as a screenplay for X-Men Origins: Magneto. By weaving Magneto’s story into a larger tapestry, we get to skip right to the best scenesalong his quest for revenge, and Fassbender is resplendent in his righteous fury. (Points taken off, though, for the infrequent intrusion of Fassbender’s own Irish accent.) We see all the reasons for Erik’s fall, sympathizing all the while with a man who sees himself as a helpless monster. And when Charles accidentally invokes the Nazi defense of “just following orders,” a chill ran up my spine because of how effectively First Class presents Magneto’s perspective. What Ian McKellen implied, First Class does well to elucidate. 
 
Groovy mutation. On the flip side, James McAvoy is a surprising Xavier, eschewing the austerity of Patrick Stewart’s performance in favor of a Swinging Sixties Charles, not above using his scientific know-how to impress the birds down at the local pub. Still, the shepherd wins out in Xavier as he assembles his first team (not G-Men, the film wryly observes, but X-Men), but more particularly when he attempts to guide Erik’s lost soul toward serenity. Indeed, it’s not hard to see First Class as a tragic love story between two men who could have been brothers; the repeated motif of the chess board, borrowed from the Bryan Singer films, suggests an unspoken bond, though a sunset picnic at the Lincoln Memorial adds a new color to the dynamic.
 
We’re the better men. I usually remember First Class fondly for the Charles and Erik dynamic, but I was surprised on this rewatch to see how many things don’t work at the same level. Kevin Bacon is hammy good fun as the film’s antagonist, but his cabal of villains are either outright boring or, in the case of January Jones’s Emma Frost, wildly miscast. Meanwhile, Hoult’s Beast is a strong supporting choice, but the rest of the team is largely indistinct; Zoe Kravitz’s Angel is a snooze, Edi Gathegi’s Darwin isn’t around long enough to make an impression, and Havok and Banshee don’t quite have personalities of their own. (On those counts, only True Believers will much care about their inclusion.) Then there’s Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven, a far cry from the sycophantic Mystique we met in the foregoing trilogy; she acquits herself well enough (despite some truly dodgy makeup), but appending her to Xavier’s origin is still a strange choice.
 
We are the future. First Class ends up walking a fine line between reboot and prequel. It’s hard to say it’s precisely a prequel to X-Men, mostly on the grounds of what happens in Days of Future Past. But while we have cameos from Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn, we also get a very different Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), a Beast who’s older than he should be, and a Summers brother that throws a wrench into the already murky family tree after we “met” Cyclops in 1979 last week. (Then again, the Summers family tree is notoriously gnarled in the comics, where it’s easy to lose count of who the third Summers brother was intended to be.) It’s all a helpful reminder not to take any of this too seriously, and for all my handwringing here, none of it interferes with my enjoyment of the film, which is somewhere near the top of my X-rankings.
 
Sound off in the comments, true believers: is First Class first in its class? Now that we’ve gone all the way back in time, we’ll jump to the end of the queue next week with The Wolverine, catching up with Logan after the events of The Last Stand.

Cinemutants - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

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 2009, it’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Learn the secret origin of James “Logan” Howlett, the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), as he enlists in a special military group reporting to William Stryker (Danny Huston). When Logan’s brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) begins hunting their teammates, Logan leaves behind a peaceful life with Kayla (Lynn Collins) and submits to an experimental procedure that gives him metallic claws.

1. The best there is at what he does. I almost never rewatch Origins unless I’m doing a thorough rewatch, and it’s not exactly because this is a bad movie. It has a few things going for it, but by and large Origins is a colossal bore. Hugh Jackman is trying, he really is, and he’s got the persona of Logan down perfectly – certainly better than in The Last Stand, at least. But it turns out that the mysterious past of Wolverine is much more interesting when we don’t have all the answers; Origins takes the most boilerplate backstory and grafts it onto Wolverine like so much adamantium. Parental issues? Check. Tragic love story? Check. Hamfisted prequel references? See below. And as for those special effects, it’s hard to think of a movie with effects that have aged worse than this one; Logan’s claws are like floating cartoons, all the wrong size, and the third act is dodgy at best.
2. The kitchen sink. Prequels shouldn’t feel like bullet points, and Act Two of this film reveals that nearly everything distinctive about Wolverine started on essentially the same day: he gets his claws, his dogtags, his motorcycle, and his leather jacket within the same 24-hour period. None of it’s very exciting, and Logan walks into the frame at one point carrying a literal sink in his hands, as if to say they’ve covered it all. But the storytellers have taken the path of least interest to get there, lining the cast with C- and D-list comic book characters as if to trick fanboys into liking the film because of its deep-cut casting. Folks took Solo to task for doing much the same thing, but the key difference was that Solo was fun; it turns out that X2 did Logan’s origins better by refusing to answer all the questions.
3. Koo-koo-ka-choo got screwed. I’ve seen Origins a few times, but I still couldn’t remember all the mutants – their names or their powers. To be fair, this mish-mosh of characters feels like the detritus of who Fox had the rights to use. Kestrel, Bolt, Silver Fox, The Blob, and Agent Zero... were these never-rans selected to save the interesting mutants for non-prequel films? Perhaps not, given that the film also phenomenally squanders the character of Gambit (played by an uncharismatic Taylor Kitsch) who, let’s be real, you and I both forgot was in this movie. He’s mere set decoration in a third act that also throws Cyclops, Professor Xavier, and maybe/maybe not Emma Frost into the mix for what I can only assume to be their availability for the marketing. (We’ll start thinking about messy timelines next week, but despite playing fast and loose with its cast, Origins doesn’t actually break too many eggs.)
4. We’re not like them! The one thing Origins has going for it is its casting. Jackman, naturally, isn’t making any missteps, but Liev Schreiber and Danny Huston are playing much better villains than this picture deserves. The film begins with an arresting credits sequence that shows Logan and Victor fighting in every war, the kind of time-skipping montage that Zack Snyder does so well, but that war sequence is the film I would rather have seen. Schreiber is having so much fun as Sabretooth, genuinely scary but also addictively fascinating to watch; it’s a genuine shame that we never saw this Sabretooth again (unless, fingers crossed, he turns up in Deadpool & Wolverine). Meanwhile, Huston plays a young(er) Stryker as the apex of sinister government banality, never quite trying to do a Brian Cox impression but still carrying that same weighty menace. Any time either one of these guys is on screen, Origins very nearly sings.
5. Take a dip in the ’Pool. Since we’re gearing up for a new Deadpool movie, it’s worth thinking about how the Merc with a Mouth comes off in Origins... and the answer is, really quite badly. In the first act, it’s astonishing how fully formed Ryan Reynolds was as Wade Wilson, how recognizable his snarky charm remained seven years before his solo film proper. But as that third act ramps up, we find that Wade’s mouth has been sewn shut, his swords have been grafted into his arms, and he’s able to teleport and shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Deadpool, this ain’t, and it has a whiff of that mid-2000s self-loathing that comic book adaptations often indulged, pretending that the source material was much too silly for the big screen. Fans hated it, Reynolds kept pushing to do it right, and now fifteen years later Deadpool isn’t a punchline. Well, not like that, at least, but it does become a memorable gag in Deadpool 2, when our Deadpool travels back in time to shoot this Deadpool in the head (and a few other places).

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did we need this Origins? Which X-Men deserved a prequel film? If you thought 1979 was a barrel of laughs, join us next week for 1962, when the whole franchise gets a prequel/reboot with X-Men: First Class.