The Average Guy Film Review:

X-Men: Apocalypse

So, technically, X-Men: Apocalypse is the eight film of this franchise. I say technically because Deadpool, the film that came out earlier, had an original title of X-Men Origins: Deadpool. With X-Men: Apocalypse, you have to ask yourself, why do I want to go see this latest installment? And that is a very good question. The build up this latest venture has been met with a lot of hand wringing over the previews. The trailers have not been met with any overall excitement, enthusiasm, or embellishment. Include me as one of the many who wasn't too particularly thrilled to see this film because the star of this film, Apocalypse, appear not to be too apocalyptic. And unfortunately, this was borne out to be the case.

In the comic book world and the cartoon world, Apocalypse is this larger than life villain who had this booming bad guy voice. In this film version, he is a demonstratively average size guy with an average voice. And in a nutshell, this is what makes up the entire film. He's not close to being menacing enough the bring fear to a populace. He's just the bad guy of the moment. You don't get any surprises with the guy. He inflates his size to show dominance but that's no big whoop. He has powers but so do the other mutants that he rely upon to do his menacing. So, why are we here watching this?

This film primarily is an origin story but why do we need to devote so much time to it? We see Storm's ascension, we see Cyclops's origins as well as Jean Grey's. We are also introduced to Angel, a fan favorite in the comic book world, as a villain. We also get holdovers from X-Men: Days of Future Past. This latest film takes place ten years after.

And this time out, Mystique is running this show. It's all about her needs this time. In the first series of X-Men, Mystique wasn't the A-story but more of a B to B+ story with her character. But this time it's Jennifer Lawrence and since you paid her, you might as well get your money's worth out of it. We get the usual rallying the troops, mutants in this case, speech, the ambiguous connection between her and Beast in the sense that some relationship of the romantic nature existed and you get to see this nurturing element to her and no indicator as to why her character turned to the dark side as they had shown in the earlier films.

We get to see Wolverine in this one as well for about five minutes but does it add to the plot development of this film, no. He's just there to add to a fight scene that find the freshman superheroes backed in a corner. William Stryker's bunker housed the Wolverine as he went through his transformation with the Adamantium. Here is the problem with that scene. We've seen it before of Wolverine's transformation and escape from Stryker in the other films. Nowhere is there any level of consistency from the old to this film. Are we suppose to buy into a different timeline of events? Did things change from the past events to cause a shift to this sequence of events? We will never know because because the director assumes that we have no recall from past films to question the larger plot holes to this film.

The action sequences are good but what you have here is another civil way story. Do you remember Batman v. Superman? What about Captain America: Civil War? Well, now you have Mutant v. Mutant. This is the hat trick of superheroes battling each other in films. The only left to do is to have the DC world invade the Marvel world and have a WWE style throw down, winner takes Wonder Woman.

This film runs at 2 hours and 24 minutes. Was it worth it? Some of it was good and some of it was not so good. Why did they chose to make this about Apocalypse and then just make him into Papa Smurf with an attitude problem is on them. This is the fourth blue skinned person. I have nothing against blue skinned people, what do they like to be referred to, turquoise Americans, aqua Americans, cerulean Caucasians, I don't know. I mean, how can you tell if they are choking or not? It gets tricky.

I have my suspicions but the fan reaction to this film hasn't been the greatest and it's justified. When early releases of the film and with Oscar Issac in the lead role as Apocalypse started filtering out, it was met with a chorus of negative comments. The produces assured the masses that it would be something that they say the fans would like but give it a chance. You want somebody to go spend their hard earned money on a chance? This is a successful franchise however, this film doesn't live up to the standards of franchise's record. The story is tepid, the plot points are hit and a miss and another miss and overall is a mostly forgettable film. The fan base was right on this one Two stars out of four.