X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

I’ve always thought the X-Men are the most inherently compelling of the major comic book properties. They can be a metaphor for any persecuted minority - meaning you can automatically invest in a resonant narrative - and in Xavier and Magneto, they have the rare rivalry where both the hero and the villain are right. You can’t dismiss Magneto out of hand given what humans do to mutants, any more than you could pretend Malcolm X didn’t have a point. At their best – Days of Future Past – the film adaptations present their perspectives as equally valid and give their conflict a moral, philosophical, and emotional dimension. The plot arises from the problem of how humans and mutants can coexist.

In Apocalypse, Xavier and Magneto speak maybe three times, and the plot arises from an ancient mutant coming back to life because CIA agent Moira McTaggert is careless with a carpet (no, really) and trying to take over the world. It might seem unfair to leave out that En Sabah Nur is a kind of mutant messiah who wants his ‘children’ to inherit the earth, and so the movie’s about –as much as it is about anything – humans vs. mutants again, but this is really lip service.

Apocalypse is full of the increasingly groan-inducing superhero staples. Destruction of cities and familiar landmarks? Cairo and the Sydney Opera house, check. Posing as a team? Apocalypse’s four horsemen, check. Vague, faux-profound dialogue which skims over issues without really addressing them? Check, multiple times, and there’s an especially robotic, stilted script in this one – check out Jean Grey’s line about being afraid she’ll hurt someone with her powers. Sophie Turner gets some thankless dreck to deliver in this film, because she’s the one with the psychic visions of Apocalypse – it probably took more than a few takes for her to say the line about his “dark power” with a straight face. Then again, she has to come out with lines almost as bad in season 5 of Game of Thrones, so she’s probably used to it.

This film felt tired and obligatory whenever either Magneto or Quicksilver weren’t on-screen. Michael Fassbender is by some distance the best thing about these movies. There’s no line he can’t deliver with conviction, and he sells the hell out of Erik’s rage, grief, and sorrow when his new family are killed – the strongest scene in the movie – he’s a magnetic screen presence. Trying to wring the last bit of pathos out of his background as a holocaust survivor, the film takes him to Auschwitz, which he tears down, in the only scene featuring Apocalypse powering-up someone which doesn’t come off as slightly funny. Quicksilver’s entrance raised questions regarding timing and knowledge, and it felt like a very convenient way to ensure almost nobody died in a giant explosion, but the way his powers are represented is so inherently cool that he’s still a plus, even though (spoiler) by the end of the film, he still hasn’t told Magneto they’re related.

While Quicksilver’s set-up doesn’t pay off, the film is good at ensuring a lot of other things do, ranging from the foreshadowing of Jean Grey’s unrestrained power to the connection between Xavier and Apocalypse and Storm’s teenage idolisation of Mystique. But rather than making the film feel tight and well-written, these feel like franchise obligations. Jean’s power, for example, is setting up the Phoenix storyline for a future instalment. The fact that Storm was apparently comfortable with genocide of humans until she saw her hero, Mystique, fighting Apocalypse – even though Mystique became a hero by saving the life of humans – is baffling. Wolverine’s cameo, which (spoiler?) was nothing more interesting than him going on a mindless rampage in a Weapon X facility, felt like a ploy to placate fanboys.

The tiredness suffusing the film continued through the poorly-choreographed and boring action climax. Unlike the Russo Brothers, action isn’t Singer’s strong suit, and while DoFP made the wise choice to restrict out-and-out superhero fights in favour of striking visuals like Magneto casually mowing down sentinels and using a stadium to tactically isolate the White House, Apocalypse doesn’t know its limits. The stale brawling – often shot with an irritatingly shaky camera – and exchanges of fluorescent energy beams are tedious and unexciting. The visualisation of Apocalypse’s power - reducing earth and stone to huge washes of sand - and Magneto’s newly-amped power resulting in grainy metal particles boiling around him are a little impressive the first time, but soon make their action scenes look overly busy and distracting, while also being ugly, like a prequel Star Wars battle. And Apocalypse never stoops looking slightly goofy.

Apocalypse has just enough bright spots – almost any time Michael Fassbender is on-screen, Quicksilver, James McAvoy – to be a mildly entertaining experience, or at least to prevent the cons from outweighing the pros, but it’s little better than mediocre. A fact it seems to acknowledge when Jean and co. walk out of a showing of Return of the Jedi (1983 references abound) and she says the third movie’s always the worst.