Apocalyptically bad

Rating: 3/10 (20 May 2016)

I personally thought Days of the Future Past to be the best of the series. And as it turns out, Apocalypse is the worst one to date.
The only bright spot in all the awfulness is Quicksilver, whose slo-mo scene is at least as good as in the previous movie, if not better. Other than that, everything else goes from mediocre to outright terrible.
The main villain's motivation is bland and stupid. (Yeah, he just wants to kill everyone and rule the world.) The way he "persuades" other mutants to join him is absolutely unbelievable - he basically just offers to increase a mutant's power and in return demands help to kill billions of people. Sounds like a fair deal. What's offputting is that the extent to which he augments his followers' powers is not constant. Like, Magneto gains the power to control pretty much all the metal on the planet at once, while Psylocke gains another special effect on her CGI laser beams or whatever it is that she emits. Apocalypse's abilities in general are largely undefined - at times he is shown pulling matter from objects around him to construct something, and then in the next shot he just makes solid objects like armor out of thin air. Another ridiculous thing was that they tried to make Isaac more intimidating by giving him thick soles so that he'd look taller, which is noticeable. What is more, his lines are cringe-worthy, but the problem is, so are everyone else's. Same boring cliché dialogues like "It's your home. We will help. Join us, Eric. I see good in you."
Yeah, forgiving Magneto like it's nothing after he helps to kill millions of people and destroy entire cities is included in the package. Also, he changes his mind about the whole "destroy the world" thing after Mystique tells him for the 100th time that he is her family and she still sees good in him.
Some of the characters' looks are still beyond ugly. I can actually see why they chose to try to keep the Beast and Mystique in their human forms more, except for saving the actors from the extensive make-up procedures. The thing is, these characters look absolutely god-damn atrocious and are painful to watch. I mean, Lawrence is annoying and redundant when she is on screen anyway, but when she is also blue, it just becomes vomit-inducing.
Recent 2016 comic-book blockbusters also did not enjoy good scripts, but at least they had high-quality gripping action scenes. This is not the case here, as fighting is mostly goofy and bland, and at times it is clearly visible by the actors' motions that they are being pulled by the strings. Or being drawn in cheap CGI.
This is actually sad. Singer's previous movie, DotFP, was outstanding. The recent Deadpool, who ostensibly shares the universe with the X-men, was awesome. And now we get a horrible, outrageously stupid and pretentious CG-overdosed mess. Let's hope the next one will be better.