X-Men: Apocalypse is the latest X-Men movie to star the younger cast from First Class and Days of Future Past. We get a return of James Macavoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult and others… now joined by Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark with an American accent) as Jean Grey, Olivia Munn as Psylocke, Alexandra Ship as Storm, and more. It’s a really big cast and a lot of them aren’t given their time to shine and, in fact, barely have anything to do (lookin’ at you Storm and Pyslock, especially considering how much you are part of the marketing). Oscar Isaac plays villain-in-blue Apocalypse who has this devious plan of… causing an apocalypse (I suppose if his parents called him Puppies and Kittens, he’d have started an animal shelter).
Anyhow, this is a perfectly ok movie. It has some cool moments and good acting throughout and sometimes the action is good and sometimes its messy. The biggest flaw is the villain who just doesn’t do anything. I mean, it’s not that he’s boring, it’s that he has other people actually commit his crimes which makes him kind of a low stakes blowhard than an actual bad guy…Minor Spoiler: his biggest crime that he personally caused was making Professor X loose his hair.
It’s distracting how little a dude named Apocalypse actually does. In fact, he’s the cause of one supposed disaster that most people watching will kind of thing is a good thing. Put this way: it’s something Christopher Reeve did heroically in one of the Superman movies. That’s kind of a problem from a script-writing standpoint, especially in that it doesn’t try to explain to the audience the ramifications of it.
Overall, this is not the worst X-Men movie by a long shot. It’s not the best by a long shot either. It’s a perfectly serviceable film that’s a little too long, a little too messy at the end, and doesn’t give its new characters any time to shine. Oh, and has a boring villain. If you’ve been to most the other X-Men movies, sure, go see this one too.
Or go see Civil War again.
Score: 74