‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Delivered the Most X-Men Moment in the Franchise Thanks to Olivia Munn

It’s hard being an X-Men fan in 2019. With Dark Phoenix’s disastrous box office performance and the increasingly obvious fact that we will never see that New Mutants movie, you really need a healing factor in order to be a diehard fan of Marvel’s mutants. I must have one, considering how much I still love the X-Men even after a dozen years of Marvel’s non-mutant heroes hogging the spotlight. The X-Men were my first love, and that’s never going to change… even if the film franchise got so much wrong. I’ve been waiting almost 20 years for an X-Men movie to deliver the same thrills I got in the comics I loved as a kid.

X-Men: Apocalypse is not a great movie. A lot of people claim it’s one of the worst in the franchise. I am not one of those people. While it suffers from the same slavish devotion to stuffing X-movies with as much middle-aged white man pain as possible, it does deliver some moments that are gleefully bonkers–in a ’90s comics kinda way. The movie borders on campiness (Apocalypse is essentially an immortal hairdresser!) and I’m here for that. Some, or I guess many, viewers weren’t. To each their own! But wherever you stand on X-Men: Apocalypse, you have to admit that it got one thing right: Psylocke.

Okay okay okay–I don’t mean the character, because it actually didn’t even get her right. She was portrayed as a villain (she’s an X-Man) and generically American (she’s famously British). As with pretty much every mutant in one of these movies, it felt like Psylocke was picked at random from the grab bag of X-canon and added to the cast because she had a cool power. So I’m not talking about the character, I’m talking about Olivia Munn (happy birthday!) and one absolutely perfect moment that comes in the film’s final showdown. I’m talking about this:

That, y’all, is perfect. It’s Psylocke. It’s X-Men. It’s quite possibly the most–perhaps the only!–moment in decades of movies to perfectly capture the kinetic momentum of ’90s X-Men comics. One of the main problems with the X-franchise was their continued reluctance to do anything, well, ridiculous.

And I mean that in a positive way! The best X-moments are supercharged by ridiculousness! Psylocke’s entire deal is ridiculous. She’s the supermodel twin sister of a British superhero who had her mind swapped with a Japanese assassin! Her iconic costume, designed by master of ’90s superhero comics Jim Lee, is hilariously impractical. The movie even took her purple thong bodysuit and upped the sexiness by adding an implausible boob window!

But it all works, because Munn has the look and ferocious attitude to pull it off (and having a look and attitude is, unfortunately, all the script gave her to do). She also endured so much physical training to get into Psylocke shape and pull off those moves. And all that work comes into play in that one moment, where Psylocke flips through the air and slices a thrown car in half with her psychic blade, the focused totality of her psychic powers. It’s next level insane and it is perfect. It’s a Jim Lee drawing come to life. It’s the one moment in all the trailers that made me pump my fist in the air.

X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t a great movie, but it’s the movie that has the most perfectly executed X-Men movie moment ever. I had to call it out on Oliva Munn’s birthday, because she already gave every X-fan the perfect gift.

Where to stream X-Men: Apocalypse