Too tough to follow Civil War...

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2016)

This X-Men movie doesn't bring anything more to the plate. It still feels like Marvel's baby brother. Not as strong actors, a weak script, bad characters' origins... It's a good action/superhero movie with a couple of great scenes, but it's just too ridiculous in some parts.
Now let's get into details. First of all, the bad characters. Psylocke is pathetic. There's 0 origin, she doesn't have her psychic powers as opposed to the comic, she has like 4 lines, and so is just as useless as Bishop was in the previous X-Men movie. Angel is utterly ruined. In the Age of Apocalypse comic books and some follow ups, he's a HUGE part, he's supposed to be Death... But here he's just a jerk kid with no past, no motivation, who gets killed easily. Rubbish. And by the way, Apocalypse is supposed to NAME his horsemen (Death, War, Famine, Pestilence). Nothing here. Storm is kind of OK, but you feel like he picked some weak mutants for the job, apart from Magneto.
Magneto by the way has some OK scenes, but the arrow thing ? Come on... Who wrote this ? It's ridiculous. One arrow, two kills ? In real life you can't pierce two bodies with a small wooden arrow and a small wooden bow... Plus there's no Wanda Maximov in the Fox's universe so it's a bit ridiculous to have Quicksilver (which is great again) without her.
Apocalypse and Xavier are OK, Apo is a good villain, but again, the script is just poor. You had 3 acts in Civil War. In there, it feels like only one act. Remember the teaser with Mystique supposedly training the X-Men ? No it's not a second act as I was waiting for it to happen, it's just the epilogue... So it feels short, mainly because you have to introduce all those characters and put in some cameos (Wolverine's cameo is quite bad frankly). When they start fighting, there's like 20 min left in the movie... The whole Weapon X thing should have been removed. This is an Apocalypse movie...
To me, Beast and Mystique were disappointments again. I still believe the Mystique from the original movies was better. Here she just feels too weak. As for Beast, it's mostly the costume and makeup. It's just ridiculous. He's too thin, and bright sky blue...
Amongst the new characters, Cyclops is OK but nothing great there. His origins are too long, he still isn't a leader, and his brother's death feels out of place. Nightcrawler is basically just a tool to teleport the team and they didn't have time for his origin story... In the end, the best scene of the movie is obviously the Phoenix scene, that'll give you chills. They've done it well, but we kinda expect it.
All in all, it's never gonna become a classic. The script is too weak, they don't have enough background to built on. Coming out AFTER Civil War makes it feel so small in comparison... I mean we wanted the AGE of Apocalypse. Not just Apocalypse barely doing some damage in Cairo... The horsemen are terrible, but you get 30 seconds of Phoenix... It could (and SHOULD) have been a lot better. X-Men movie fans will probably love it for that phoenix scene, or for the "grandeur" it sometimes displays, and Fox gave them nice little carrots here and there (Wolverine, a bald Xavier, Magneto and his concentration camp past...) but it's just not enough for me, I need a good script. The whole film takes place in what, a couple of days ? Again Civil War had time to develop, with the incident in Lagos, then the accords, then the escape, the fight, the villain etc... etc... Here, it's the origin of everyone, for like an hour, then Apo collecting his horsemen and convincing them at the speed of light (what a sweet talker...), then a 15 min fight. The end.