The New Mutants

Directed by Josh Boone, The New Mutants follows five young mutants, including Anya Taylor-Joy’s Illyana Rasputin and Maisie Williams’ Rahne Sinclair, as they’re held against their will within a secret facility and, eventually, forced to team up to battle a seemingly unstoppable threat. It’s a somewhat promising setup that’s employed to progressively interminable effect by Boone, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Knate Lee, delivers a sluggish and hopelessly claustrophobic endeavor that contains few (if any) elements designed to alleviate the often disastrously uneventful narrative – with, especially, the presence of one-dimensional, one-note protagonists only compounding the movie’s crushingly tedious atmosphere. (It goes without saying, certainly, that the talented cast is unable to breathe any life into their uniformly tiresome characters.) The lackadaisical pace, coupled with an emphasis on entirely tedious happenings, paves the way for a midsection that grows less and less interesting as it progresses, while the overuse of computer-generated effects ensures that the action-heavy third act is nothing short of disastrous (and endless) – which does, in the end, cement The New Mutants‘ place as a predominantly disastrous comic-book adaptation that stands as the worst the genre has to offer.

* out of ****