In an age of needless sequels there can be no better example than the latest X-Men film, a series that has honestly not produced a single satisfying or truly good movie, yet has still survived 6 different installments. [I count the Wolverine series separately, and did like the Japan-set “The Wolverine” although the first Wolverine movie is awful.]
What Works: How can a movie with Michael Fassbender, Oscar Isaacs, Jennifer Lawrence, Sophia Turner, Alexandra Shipp (the young Storm, and an actress you’ll want to see more of), and Olivia Munn in a skintight latex suit possibly be bad? Well, somehow it is…
What Doesn’t: A truly great movie takes bad assets and turns them good (like getting a great performance out of a lousy actor) while the reverse is also true. You know “X-Men, the 15th” is bad because even its best assets don’t work: “Dazzling” special effects are now meaningless since we can’t trust our eyes and the rules of what our central villain can or can’t do are never properly explained. We’ve seen Fassbender’s Magneto have roughly the same arc (he starts out in hiding, turns bad, then doubles back last minute) in every film, and this is the first time even he seems bored with it. Promising new actors are either given nothing to do (like Munn who is utterly wasted and barely says five sentences) or buried in piles of unrecognizable make-up (why cast an actor of Isaacs worth to essentially play Grimace?)
And that may lead to one of the series biggest problems: Jennifer Lawrence. The “X-Men” franchise has a tricky problem by casting someone as Mystique who is now too big a star to play Mystique. Lawrence has been really vocal about not liking the make-up…which is why Mystique’s trademark blue look is all of 5 minutes in this movie. The prequel/sequel timelines of this prequel/sequel trilogy have never really made sense, and it can’t make up its mind if it’s the Patrick Stewart/Hugh Jackman/Halle Berry X-Men (Jackman shows up here in a joyless cameo) or McAvoy/Fassbender/Lawrence X-Men or maybe something even newer than that with an even younger generation of mutants like Turner, Shipp, Evan Peters (Quiksilver), or Tye Sheridan (Cyclops).
What I Would Have Done Differently: Given Olivia Munn more than one sentence, and had the new generation do more since Sheridan, Shipp, Turner, etc. may now be more intriguing than the older X-Men figures. Lawrence—who is more right as the star of a franchise than part of the ensemble—should be able to pursue other things since she’s never really been right for Mystique anyway.
But none of that will fix the franchise’s real problem: Bryan Singer. He has directed nearly all of the X-Men movies, and his direction is increasingly impersonal and lackluster. Even when he does something right, it’s pretty much on accident and he tries to replicate it (like the last film’s Quiksilver “Time in a Bottle” rescue sequence that is ripped-off here as a “Sweet Dreams” rescue sequence). It’s clear that the man who directed “The Usual Suspects” (his lone great movie) two decades ago is dead, and it’s time for new blood to see what they can do with such an overstuffed, assemblyline-style product.