"The New Mutants" Review - From the Vaults

I'm gonna be that guy.

"The New Mutants" focuses on Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a Cheyenne Mutant who survives a massacre at her reservation and wakes up in a strange old hospital run by the enigmatic Dr Cecelia Reyes (Alice Braga), who tells her that she is here to be trained and studied so that she may one day be free. Also present are nice Catholic Irish girl Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams); nice guy with bruises and his arm in a cast Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton); sexy rich Brazilian Bobby da Costa (Henry Zaga); and Eastern European bully and best character Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), who talks to a sock puppet of a dragon named Lockheed and makes it her mission to strike out against this new arrival. But this facility may not be what it seems, and their pasts may catch up with them...

Okay, this is a product of nearly five years of fuck ups, studio interference, reshoots, dickery and "Fantfourstic" levels of dis-functional: scenes seem random, the horror elements are not scary, the characters weakly sketched for the most part, the tone inconsistent.

But I fucking defend this movie.

Pictured: Our Queen and some other fucking losers

I don't hate it or deride it, I pity it, it's a fucking miracle this got released in the first place. There is enough vision and creativity on display here to carry it for the most part. You can tell that it was supposed to be about 5 different broken teens confronting their fears and their own burgeoning powers, as well as each other, culminating in their escape and final act of insanity (which I WILL GET TO!).

There are enough details here to see what they were trying to do: Guthrie has his arm in a cast and a constant black eye, unable to control his powers and believing he belongs in here; da Costa asking him how it was in the mines, and a nice dichotomy of character there (even if it comes RIGHT AFTER Maisie Williams literally introduces the gang and their backstories in an exposition monologue); the bully Rasputin making up for her horrifying past and disregard for the authorities who have fucked her all her life by taking it out on the new kid, yet finding solace in a childhood hand puppet; da Costa being here because his parents wanted to "cure him" and more.

Yet the scenes, whilst flowing surprisingly well in terms of the narrative they MEANT to get, seem random. The interference is abundantly clear. The final act is an explosive and dynamic fight between a Demon Bear and a bunch of ragtag misfits and their imaginary dragon (which is honestly something I would write), jarring and at odds with the attempted "Nightmare on Elm Street 3" vibe they were going for. If I were to, on an ordinary day, tell you that there is a movie where nightmare smiley people and a demon bear do battle with a werewolf, a human cannonball, the Human Torch, a Native American lesbian and Anya Taylor-Joy wielding a magic sword; you'd probably be down for that: RIGHT up until I told you it was aiming to be a horror movie.

The diversity of the cast is a welcome touch (even if da Costa was apparently black in the books) down to way better LGBT representation than one would expect normally in this; but as I said it comes across as what it is: the product of a long and arduous fight between studios and director.

Then there is the saving grace.

Anya Taylor-Joy.

She plays Rasputin as a cross between the mean girl in a prison movie, and a genuinely broken trauma victim, balancing it perfectly, and even managing to make the ridiculous finale land, where she wields a magic sword one moment to fight the demon bear in order to buy time for her friends/fellow inmates to escape, whilst also being too traumatised to fight the lesser demons personal to her and tormenting her her entire life, taking solace in teleporting away after anguish and speaking with her puppet Lockheed.

We don't deserve Anya Taylor-Joy, can we at least (as a species) get her a gift basket or something?

This is the most frustrating movie of the last few years.

And I'll defend it.