X-Men: Apocalypse — Review
‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ is a pretty good ‘X-Men’ movie. Not a great ‘X-Men’ movie — so far that distinction has only fallen to 2003’s ‘X2’ and 2014’s ‘Days of Future Past’ — but it gets the job done with enough style and spectacle to make the idea of another one of these movies continue to be a welcome one.
So in the latest installment of this series you may love or hate for kicking off our recent (and foreseeably endless era of superhero blockbusters) it’s 1983 and the ancient mutant Apocalypse (a blue Oscar Isaac) has just woken up angry in Egypt after a 5600-year nap. He doesn’t like what the world has come to (“the weak are in power” he whines) and aims to do something about it. Something like, I dunno, destroy everything and start civilization all over again. Typical.
To see through his evil plan, Apocalypse enlists the help of angry mutants Magneto (the returning Michael Fassbender), Storm (Alexandra Shipp, who is not surprisingly better than Halle Berry), Angel (Ben Hardy, cool wings bro), and Psylocke (Olivia Munn in a kinky blue number with a fiery whip that’ll make you question if director Bryan Singer is truly gay, or just faking so he gets to shoot stuff like this without seeming as shamelessly exploitive as Michael Bay). So it’s up to the good mutants (I’m not gonna name all of them, seriously, there’s like 50 I think) to stop the blue meanie before the movie hits the three-hour mark.
There’s a lot of good actors here, which is great because of the good bit, yet a little bit less great when I realized I had no idea who the main character was. Hell, I can’t even narrow it down to three. There’s no question this movie suffers from some ‘Age of Ultron’ too-much-shit-going-on syndrome (unless Bryan Singer just sneakily made the Robert Altman movie of superhero flicks), and sometimes a little more focus is nice to have in mainstream entertainments like this one. But while in the Marvel movies stuff often feels shamelessly thrown in to setup future installments, I appreciated that most everything here seemed to be working toward telling this one story.
Among returning talents are James McAvoy as the wise Professor Xavier, and Jennifer Lawrence as the shape-shifting Mystique, a character who’s on the good side once again in this one. At one point when Xavier mentions that Rose Byrne’s character barely seems to have aged a day, you might find yourself realizing that none of these characters have in the 20 years since ‘First Class’ took place. Perhaps the awkward line was intended as a “we know” wink at the audience, but I might have still left that bit out. ‘Apocalypse’ also introduces us (at least chronologically-speaking) to Jean Grey (Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) and Cyclops (Tye Sheridan from ‘The Tree of Life’ and ‘Mud’), both welcome series additions.
Bryan Singer does a predictably solid job directing this, his fourth ‘X-Men’ feature, and even makes time to include a quick joke that seems to be knocking Brett Ratner’s disappointing third ‘X-Men’ film. Highlights of this movie for me included another slow-mo Quicksilver (Evan Peters) sequence (cool, but still a bigger yet ironically less spectacular version of his ‘Days of Future Past’ set-piece) and a sweet cameo by… well, if you’ve seen the TV ads you know, and if you haven’t I’ll let you be surprised. ‘Apocalypse’ is certainly enjoyable, yet for all the end-of-the-world destruction it feels a good deal less significant than ‘Days of Future Past.’ Using the screenwriter’s cheat of a time-travel plot-line, that movie’s story had great bearing on not only the proceeding installments, but the preceding ones as well. This time it’s just another bad guy, and not even a hugely interesting one at that.
Yet despite these underwhelming aspects and an Avengers overkill of a climax (they could’ve easily clipped 15 from the finale alone, pushing this movie closer to the two-hour mark, instead of the occasionally exhausting two and a half hours it is), a lot of ‘Apocalypse’ still works rather well. If you’re indifferent to these kinds of movies I’d say leave it alone —this one ain’t winning over no converts — but if you, like me (based on the movies alone), count yourself an ‘X-Men’ fan, you’ll probably dig checking out what the new installment has to offer. Just do me a favor and see ‘The Nice Guys’ first, alright?
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