Honest Trailer for New Mutants Just Eviscerates it
We already knew that The New Mutants was bad. But could we have guessed that it was this bad?
Our Vivian Kane reviewed The New Mutants, the long-delayed “new” X-Men (of a sort) movie, with so much disdain for the product that I never expected to watch it myself. Thanks to the wonder of Honest Trailers, however, you and I can view some “highlights” from New Mutants without having to actually subject ourselves to the entire film.
Because wow, does this thing look to be a mess, and not even the fun kind of mess you can enjoy cackling over with a big bowl of popcorn in hand. Combine young, befuddled-looking actors, a corrupted tangle of special effects, a genre that isn’t sure if it’s superheroes or horror or … YA romance? … and what appears to be an absolute trainwreck of a script, and we get this.
Or, as Honest Trailers describes the formula for the film:
“So try to enjoy a film that feels like a long pilot episode that CW passed on. That manages to be one quarter-assed horror flick, one quarter-assed Breakfast Club, one quarter-assed YA romance, and one quarter-assed superhero movie … and when you add all of that up, you get something that’s 100% complete ass.”
I think what’s most disappointing here for me, beyond frustration that movies this awful keep getting made by big studios, is the waste of a talented young cast. While our favorite Stark, Maisie Williams, seems like she’s trying her best to breathe some kind of angsty life into Rahne Sinclair, what in the holy hell is going on with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Illyana Rasputin? Taylor-Joy, the gifted breakout star of Queen’s Gambit, looks like she’s phoning in this role and her Russian “accent” after watching one (1) Cold War-era propaganda movie. I don’t even want to speculate what kind of direction Charlie Heaton was given in his performance as Sam Guthrie, clutching a lump of coal.
And the horrible, casual racism directed at Blu Hunt’s Dani Moonstar? How was this script, co-written by director Josh Boone and Knate Lee, ever given the greenlight? How could dozens of people gather to film these words, set them down on celluloid for all time, without anyone in a position of responsibility or authority jumping in to say, “Hey, what if we didn’t constantly malign a character’s Native American identity with the blatant racism of a Donald Trump tweet?”
There was a time when I felt badly for these young actors about New Mutants’ constant delays. But now it seems that it might have been better for all of them—and all of us—if it had never seen the light of day.
TL;DR: “They meet up, learn about each others’ fears. Then a bear pops out.”
(image: Honest Trailers/Screengrab/20th Century Studios)
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