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The New Mutants Movie Review

The New Mutants is a 2020 superhero horror film directed by Josh Boone and starring Maisie Williams and Anya Taylor-Joy. It’s a major disappointment.

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“This isn’t a hospital, Pocahontas. It’s a cage“

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After waiting for years for this movie to be released, it finally got its release and is in the middle of a pandemic no less. And we all got terribly disappointed. Well, many had expected it would be bad, but I still held some hope as the premise was just very intriguing. It is about five teenagers who are mutants. They are held at a secret institution where they are taught to suppress their powers. The movie obviously had a lot of potential to be this unique horror drama genre film, but it just did not pan out well unfortunately.

The movie simply doesn’t work because it’s not all that interesting. I do admire the slower pace and more character-driven approach, but they failed at that because most of these people were just so undercooked and most of the dialogue wasn’t all that intriguing. Rahne is interesting and Williams is good in the role, I liked the lesbian romance at the center of the movie and Anya Taylor-Joy is excellent in the best role of the film, but she is beyond that by now as evidenced by her ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ success.

Most of the other characters were utterly forgettable and so bland. It was also odd seeing all of these people much younger than they are now as the movie had such a long production/release history. Some of the character relationships and drama was good, but the horror elements were really lacking. Those otherworldly creatures were eerie and the only memorable creatures in the movie with all the others being uninteresting.

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The New Mutants is never as scary as it should have been and not at all sophisticated. A lot can be done with this subject matter and genre, but here we got very little in return unfortunately. The mutants’ powers felt random and too odd in comparison to the previous ones in the franchise. Some are cool, but most are odd. The VFX are okay, but the film overall felt very cheap with the performances being good, but everything else being subpar.