Maybe from the ashes of this movie they'll build a better one?

Rating: 5/10 (22 May 2016)

"Does it ever wake you in the middle of the night? The feeling that one day, they'll come for you? And your children?"
Wise words from the always questionable Magneto (Michael Fassbender) as he reminds Charles Xavier, not for the first time, that his school for gifted children will never really be safe from the true enemy-- humans. This a theme that runs through the entire X-men series, the fear of being different and how we as humans don't like what we have no control or understanding over.
Director Bryan Singer, the only man that seems capable of sending the X-men franchise in the right direction, takes the reigns for what might possibly be the last time. This time around the team of newbie recruits are pitted against the most powerful mutant of all time, Apocalypse. So why, then, is he so underwhelming? Opening all the way back in ancient Egyptian times, Apocalypse is in the middle of some kind of transformation ceremony with a willing follower (Oscar Isaac), before all goes wrong and he becomes trapped underground for thousands of years. Flash forward to 1983 and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is hiding out after becoming an icon for saving President Nixon some ten years ago at the end of the last movie. Charlies Xavier (James McAvoy) is continuing to run his flourishing school for mutants and Eric 'Magneto' (Michael Fassbender) is living a quiet factory life in Poland with his lovely new family. There's also a bunch of new, and old, fan favorite characters that appear back in the X-men fold. The roster is still nowhere near as impressive as Marvel's Avengers movies.
The action, as promised, is on a huge scale. But the problem is the clunky first half of the film, with unimportant side plots like the reactivated love between Charles and Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) that take away from the overall story and make you wishing the ultimate showdown would just happen already. And then when it does finally happen, you feel like it came and went with absolutely no feelings to see it repeated, just a simple "MEH".
Among the problems with such ensemble movies as this is that new characters get introduced, leaving other characters to get lost in the storm. It's unfortunate here, then, that one of the characters that gets lost is Apocalypse himself. Not that there's anything wrong with the new additions to the team, but introducing them one-by-one makes way for moments of the movie where Apocalypse is nowhere to be seen. And in the scenes where he does actually appear, he just doesn't seem to hit with the kind of punch you'd expect from the first ever mutant and the greatest X-men villain of all time.
Apocalypse seems like most of the on-screen Marvel villains from the last ten years, with little or no defining characteristics other than he hates humans and wants to destroy the world. Most of what he even says throughout the film is just overly long speeches with little oomph about the new age of mutants to come. Other than trapping people in walls, he doesn't seem all that scary. Even Isaac, as amazing an actor as he is fast becoming in Hollywood at the moment, seems to struggle with bringing out Apocalypse's true nature and power. He looks the part, but there's still something else missing. There's a couple of standout scenes that save the movie, one involving Quicksilver (Evan Peters) that surely beats his scene from the last movie and another involving an old metal-clawed friend of the franchise. But overall, the action is over-the-top large-scale destruction, almost like the kind from Man Of Steel that makes you think how you can ever go back after it. It's also darkly violent and sometimes a little scary for younger viewers, not that that's always a bad thing.
Let's not forget the new additions to the team too; Tye Sheridan as a cool but frightened Cyclops, Kodi Smit-McPhee as a humorous Nightcrawler and Game Of Thrones regular Sophie Turner as an adequate Gene Grey. Then we also have three of the four horsemen; Oliva Munn as Psylocke, Alexander Shipp as Storm and Ben Hardy as angel-- all of whom are completely underused and not given the proper time to explore. All the regulars, not forgetting Beast (Nicholas Hault), are on as good as form as their previous installments.
The movie does very well to add into the story the mutant's life-long struggle to be accepted, as both normal and heroes. But they're not normal. They're different, which is something that makes them feared and hunted throughout their comic book lives. Most of their threats come from humans more than any other villains, which is what makes Bolivar Trask from the last movie such a great villain. They will never be accepted, no matter what they do, and they know it. That's a hard truth to swallow.
In the end, what's left is a movie that could've been so much better, a wasted opportunity to take a villain with such rich and powerful history and make him memorable. But instead he's easily forgotten about by the end credits. Yes, it is the end to Bryan Singers trilogy, maybe. But fitting? Certainly not. He chose to go out with a bang instead of trying to repeat the success, both story wise and villain, of the last movie. It was slow in the middle and rushed in the end, which only made things worse. If you're a die-hard X-men fan you'll enjoy it, but if you're not you'll consider it an average super hero movie. However, and let's be honest here, nothing can really be worse than the never-forgotten X-men: The Last Stand.