X-Hausted: THE NEW MUTANTS

It must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time: spin a cheaper, low-key X-Men spin-off by extending the early body horror teen drama moments at the beginning of the 2000 movie that began the whole franchise. Remember the early scene of Anna Paquin coming into her powers? She kisses a boy and he starts having a seizure. The veins in his face bulge. He collapses as Paquin screams in fear and confusion. It’s easy to see why The Fault in Our Stars’ Josh Boone could convince the powers that be at Fox (at the time) that a feature length version of that could be effective. 

So here are The New Mutants, arriving after a complicated release date shuffling that left the project effectively an orphaned afterthought. Now no longer a promising offshoot of a going concern, the Disney acquisition of its parent company has left it a weird one-off, an abandoned what-if, a castoff misfire, a dead-end. At least it didn’t happen to a good movie. Here Boone gives us a quintet of moody mutant teens cooped up in a mysterious asylum where the lone employee (Alice Braga) claims to want to help them discover their powers. It’s a small, evil mirror of Professor X’s academy. Here the burgeoning mutants are afraid of what might be lurking in their bodies and minds. There are group therapy sessions — like a boring Breakfast Club where occasionally someone lights themselves on fire or disappears into another dimension or something — and plenty of down time as the movie lazily winds its way to a half-hearted CG climax. Along the way, the young actors are given stiff lines and soupy accent work—leaving usually reliable performers like Maisie Williams and Anya Taylor-Joy traipsing through exposition with painfully clunky squeaks and quips. 

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with the movie that plot or character or setting wouldn’t have fixed. The whole thing is an exercise in futility, like a bland pilot for a show that won’t get picked up, or a comic book experiment that’s bound to get cancelled a few issues in. The figures don’t pop; the mood never picks up any atmosphere; the filmmaking is functional at best—all close-ups and medium shots. The set is simple and spare; the movie's one location never feels like a real place, or makes sense as the pressure-cooker it should be. The effects are modest and ineffectual. Even the best visual ideas — creepy Slendermen attackers who swarm near the end, a glowing blue psychic sword — are rendered with a been-there-done-that groan of complacency. If this monotonous slog to nowhere is the best this once-great series could give us, I’m more than ready to put it out to pasture and let some new blood rethink its path forward.

Damon's Run: ELYSIUM

Set in a pessimistically plausible future, Elysium finds the world’s richest few orbiting the Earth in a space station of the same name. It’s a perfect artificial paradise free of disease and strife. Everyone else is struggling to survive on the planet below, a world that is overpopulated, polluted, and where poverty is pervasive and inescapable. To get sick here is a death sentence. That’s what happens to Max, an ex-con turned factory worker played by the always-likable Matt Damon. He’s caught in an accident on the factory floor and told he has five days to live. Desperate to survive, he begs a man (Wagner Moura) who specializes in getting illegal transports to Elysium to find him passage. The deal is this: if he can make it to the space station, he must agree to help those in need. Pumped full of painkillers and fitted with a robotic exoskeleton that’s been painfully drilled into his body, Max is sent out on a mission to crash Elysium and liberate health care for the masses.

The film is written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made his feature debut in 2009 with the phenomenally successful District 9, a movie that used aliens that land and are promptly subjugated in South Africa as a metaphor for apartheid. I wasn’t the biggest fan, but it’s certainly an enjoyable movie for the most part. Now, with Elysium, he’s made a film that’s even more overt and heavy-handed about its allegorical intent. It’s loud and simple, but powered by so much contagious anger towards a super-rich minority who here not only keep to themselves enjoying total worry-free luxury while the majority barely gets by, but horde clean air, clean water, and the best medical care available. It is an unjust situation, plain and simple. The icy head of security (Jodie Foster) is determined to keep out the unwanted masses, going so far as to shoot down incoming unauthorized space shuttles filled with illegal immigrants. She looks at them as moochers unworthy to even glimpse Elysium’s palatial suburban gardens or catch a sniff of their pristine air.

In the film’s opening minutes, terrific detail and convincing special effects fill up the screen in fine sci-fi fashion. Set in future Los Angeles far from the typical Blade Runner vision, vehicles are worn-down, technology is unreliable, the teeming masses speak a combination of English and Spanish and live in a sprawling, crowded series of favelas. Max is the victim of police brutality, the coldly logical robot cops beating him for nothing more than his criminal past and a bad joke. He sees his parole officer, a scuffed plastic head with a mocking frozen smile telling him in a muffled computerized accent that he has eight additional months probation. By the time he’s had the accident and makes the deal to attempt an escape to Elysium, we’re fully immersed in the labyrinthine details that keep the majority of the population poor. It’s a systematic failure enforced by Elysium and unwillingly perpetrated by those on the ground. What is made at the factory Damon works? The very robots that keep the populace down.

All the allegorical force and intriguing futurist conjecture of the film’s opening third is placed in the background as the action cranks up and the film becomes a thundering, clattering, lightning fast spectacle of fisticuffs, gunfire, explosions, and gore. The head of security activates an extralegal agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley), a vicious creep outfitted with all kinds of fancy weaponry capable of liquefying anyone in his path. He storms after Max and the movie becomes a tense series of bruising combat and close calls. The haves-versus-have-nots throughline very nearly gets lost in the shuffle in a movie more interested in fun setpieces, super cool special effects, and villainous switcheroos than in making sure the allegory tracks perfectly at all times. But an innocent nurse (Alice Braga) and her sick daughter (Emma Tremblay) get caught up in the action to provide a boost of emotional content and obvious rooting interest. (Who can root against a sick child, right?)

Blomkamp keeps the look of the picture agreeably skuzzy. The amount of dirt, grime, dust, and sweat on display makes all the more vivid the earthlings living conditions, as well as their constant toil and exertion. It makes their striving all the more real and urgent, especially in contrast to all the sleek lines and pristine surfaces orbiting above them. He’s smart to make the drive to sneak aboard Elysium not about stomping on wealth out of jealousy or spite, but to provide life-saving resources (medicine, clean air, pure water) for those most in need. It’s a fight for rights. The fight turns into a fairly typical sci-fi actioner, but it’s done in a largely satisfying way, just inventive enough to keep things interesting. I could’ve done without quite this level of lingering on splattery violence, with futuristic weaponry that blows people apart, but I would not for one second suggest going without the film’s biggest gory shock to one character’s face and the coolest gross-out effect that soon follows. You’ll know it if you see it.

Though both the film’s intriguing world-building and hurtling action are largely symbolic and naturally, forcefully thin, the thinly written roles have the benefit of some fine actors. But only Damon truly elevates the material, with his natural, compelling ability to invite instant empathy put to use with a no-frills, working-man striving in his demeanor, a resigned sadness in his eyes that sharpens into steely, determined hope. He’s a compelling center around which a sci-fi concept can confidently turn into a mildly brainy shoot-‘em-up. Though it ends up in a more standard place than it initially appears headed, Elysium is ultimately fast and satisfying on the most basic levels. It’s entertaining and trim, fun in the moment and over before you know it.

Night of the Hunter: PREDATORS

With Predators, director Nimrod Antal continues his streak of consummate B-movie craftsmanship, following the better-than-you’d-expect Armored, by making his creature feature chill and thrill with efficient, streamlined artistry. Of course, his film is no less silly at its core than its Predator predecessors, but it still manages to work, on average, better. It’s certainly not Antal’s fault that the film ends up not that great. It runs out of stream just when it should be ramping up, but for the majority of its runtime, Predators is just diverting enough.

The film transposes the original’s earthbound alien hunter concept into a more otherworldly setting. It opens with Adrien Brody, as an ex-military mercenary, waking up while plummeting from the sky, wearing a parachute that automatically opens. When he lands, he finds himself joined by other tough figures from around the world. There’s the grizzled Danny Trejo, the tough Alice Braga, the overwhelmed Topher Grace, the slimy Walton Goggins, the gruff Oleg Taktarov,the stoic Louis Ozawa Changchien, and the strong Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. They’re all deadly – well, except for Grace – and they’re all very angry. It soon becomes clear that they’ve been kidnapped and dropped onto an alien planet to be hunted by the Predators. Why does it become clear? Because Adrien Brody’s a really, really good guesser.

For most of the film, the characters dodge traps, shoot at aliens and try to survive. Antal deploys the special effects with a surprising visceral force. The mix of practical and digital effects is very convincing; the images have a heft and danger that is hard to achieve in this age of cheap, easy CGI. When the actors tumble down a hill, avoid falling spikes, or splash over a waterfall, it looks and feels like real people performing physical stunts. This extra spike of old-school danger is enhanced by Antal’s great eye for compositions and ability to hold a shot for longer than modern schlock usually allows.

And the movie’s certainly schlock. The Predator series strikes me as having one of the most limiting concepts of any franchise. I mean, once you’ve seen one ugly alien hunter stalking a group of people, you’ve seen them all. But, it’s to Antal’s credit, and to the credit of screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, working from a concept by producer Robert Rodriguez, that this picture moves and thrills as much as it does. It’s convincingly exciting and scary, moving with a slimy speed that zips things along. The movie really works, bringing the low-rent summer fun in mildly satisfying, if often unsurprising, ways.