Too set up heavy with not enough pay off, X-Men: Apocalypse still manages to deliver a fun and exciting movie that feels very much like the source material.

When the alleged first mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) wakes after thousands of years worth of slumber and starts recruiting his four horsemen to bring about the destruction of the world, a new team of X-Men must emerge to stop him. That one of those horsemen is Magneto (Michael Fassbender) in the wake of personal tragedy and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is Apocalypse’s next target brings the event to global destruction level raises the stakes higher than they have ever been.

Before I get too far into this I feel I should mention that I have been an X-Men fan for close to 30 years. In that time we have seen a lot of iterations of the characters and the team as a whole including cartoons, comics, and of course movies. It is kind of hard to pin them down to just one thing or another given the amount of alternate realities and time travel changes that have happened over the years but there has always been a feeling about them, about who the characters are and what they are about. I said all that to say that this X-Men is one of the most X-meniest X-men that ever did X-Men. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it is fair to say that this movie goes farther toward doing what X-Men fans have said they wanted since they started doing X-Men movies. Whether they are happy with it is another thing altogether but as a life-long fan, I found it to be very accurate to how the comic and characters feel even down to the way it is told.

With the above out of the way, it is also fair to say that structurally the movie chugs quite a bit in the beginning while something like six characters are introduced (or re-introduced as it were) with several getting the short  shrift due to the fact that movies generally can’t be four hours. The pace starts to pick up once everything is set up and we get some genuinely great material but there just isn’t enough of it to elevate this into true greatness. As a fan of the characters and source material I found there was enough to love to really enjoy it but more casual fans may not have the same patience for it.

The biggest issue with this movie is that there is just a lot of ground to cover and while there is very little that is unnecessary here, there just isn’t enough time to develop things they way they should be which is where telling the story like a comic might really stumbles. A lot of people think that comics can be a one to one transition between the books and movies because comic panels are essentially storyboards but the way information is delivered in comics is still different and a story arc like apocalypse would last a solid 132 to 200 pages and those pages do not equal one minute of screen time. A threat like Apocalypse in a two and a half hour movie is going to feel one note and flat when you also have a whole team of super heroes to introduce/reintroduce and a whole villain team to build while also spending time developing the why behind the most powerful of them makes the decision to help cleanse the world of the weak. A film like this would have likely been better served as a long for series but what we have here is more of a cliff notes version.

Even still, Apocalypse crams a lot of material into a small space and it does it with a lot of attention to details that we haven’t seen in the X-Men films before. It also solidly ignores the continuity that came before Days of Future Past tidied it all and it allows for a fresh look at characters we are familiar with in ways we haven’t seen before. There is one sequence in particular that I will not spoil but it was awesome to finally see in a film and it felt really perfect. At the end of the day I left the movie excited for more and feeling like storylines that I thought I would never see in film could actually happen now. That was a good feeling.

Ducking back to some negative stuff, I would be lying if I said that all the effects look awesome in the movie. It is generally well done with interesting action and effects but there are some moments that look kind of goofy or unfinished. There is a shot of Psylocke (Olivia Munn) cutting a car in half from the trailer that looks like absolute horseshit that looks the same in the film. There are a few moments like this throughout the movie although it wasn’t enough to ruin the movie.

 

For whatever faults the film has, the performances are consistently on point. McAvoy and Fassbender anchor the film with typically solid performances. I could watch both of them share chocolate cookie recipes and I would be engaged so I will gladly enjoy them here. Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult hold down the rest of the First Class cast as Mystique and Beast and are somber and grounding. New comers Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), and Smit-McPhee are all great in their respective roles bringing us a new flavor to those characters that are free of the years of hardship they had in the original X-Men films. Evan Peters (Quicksilver) again gives us some of the film’s best moments and brings much needed humor to the film.

On Apocalypse’s side we have solid outings from Munn, Ben Hardy (Angel), and Alexandria Shipp (Storm) but none of them have anywhere near enough to do. Psylocke and Angel in particular are more like background dressing until the final showdown and then they don’t do a ton anyway. That is a bummer but they did the best they could with what they had to work with. Oscar Isaac is pretty unrecognizable as Apocalypse and while his character doesn’t do a lot more than heavy villain work, Isaac brings the right amount of weight and gravitas to the character.

Conclusion [8.5 out of 10]

Despite its issues, I really liked X-Men: Apocalypse. It has the misfortune of being released in the same year as Captain America: Civil War and Deadpool, both of which are much better, but it is also head and shoulders better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  If you are experiencing super hero fatigue this summer then you aren’t going to find relief here. But this is not a bad film and if you are an X-Men fan there is a lot to love. More casual viewers may not have the patience for it but if you hang in there with it there is a good movie in there. Just manage expectations and maybe check out a matinee.