Stream It or Skip It: ‘The New Mutants’ on HBO, Where Mutants Meet Low-Budget Horror

After a two and a half year delay, a major Disney acquisition, a worldwide pandemic, and a lackluster theatrical run because of said pandemic, The New Mutants—Fox’s final X-Men film—got a home video release in November of 2020. Now, it has finally made its way to HBO and HBO Max. So… was it worth the wait?

THE NEW MUTANTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Based on the deeply beloved ’80s iteration of the New Mutants comic book series, the feature film adaptation drops five deeply traumatized teens with uncontrollable superpowers into a horror movie scenario. The teens in question are: Scottish werewolf Rahne Sinclair (Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams), fiery Brazilian bro Roberto da Costa (13 Reasons Why’s Henry Zaga), a coal-miner turned human cannonball named Sam Guthrie (Stranger Things‘ Charlie Heaton), sword-slinging Russian riot girl Illyana Rasputin (The VVitch’s Anya Taylor-Joy), and entry point character Dani Moonstar (Another LIfe’s Blu Hunt), whose powers are initially unknown. They’re prisoners of a rundown hospital with only one person on staff, a dubious doctor (Alice Braga) serving a mysterious benefactor.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Surprisingly, not the other million movies in the X-Men franchise. New Mutants is as big of a departure from the standard superhero formula as 2017’s grim and grounded Logan. This is not a superhero movie, and it has way more in common with claustrophobic horror classics like The Shining and Alien… with a dash of The Breakfast Club, TBH. Now, that’s not to say that The New Mutants is as successful as any of the aforementioned films (more on that in a sec), but it helps tremendously to not go in expecting to see Spider-Man: Homecoming with mutants.

Performance Worth Watching: With only six performers in pretty much the entire film, weak links would be incredibly easy to spot. This is where New Mutants succeeds: it is—unlike literally every other X-Men movie ever—a true ensemble where none of the protagonists feel shafted. They’re all good—but Maisie Williams and Anya Taylor-Joy are particularly outstanding as the heroes comic readers know as Wolfsbane and Magik.

Williams takes a character who could easily be a one-note, Catholic killjoy and infuses her with light and an openness that makes her the heart of the film. On the flip side, Taylor-Joy devours every single scene she’s in as the demon-ish Illyana, delivering one of the most captivating super-performances I’ve seen in a minute. She simply is Magik, ripped from the page and put on film via sorcery.

Single Best Shot: Take this from someone who has never been that fond of the Illyana Rasputin of the comics (what she did to Colossus back during AvX was cruel!): New Mutants justified its entire existence with every single shot of Anya Taylor-Joy with the Soulsword.

Sex and Skin: What’s a teen movie without a shower scene and a steamy make out in a pool? But while the movie goes hard with some Nightmare on Elm Street style horror, it doesn’t even come close to matching the kind of gratuitous nudity of that era. It is still PG-13, after all!

Our Take: All I have to say is—and I mean this on many levels—finally. If it wasn’t clear by now, I have a deep, almost 30 year love of the X-Men, specifically the New Mutants crew. Is New Mutants the X-Men movie that I’ve been waiting 20 years to see, convinced that it would never happen—and then after it was actually made, increasingly convinced that it would gather dust in the Disney vault? Sorta, yeah. So… was it worth the wait? In short: kinda. New Mutants was worth the wait because, bewilderingly, VOD is actually the format it was meant to be seen in.

This is not a superhero movie. This is not a big budget movie. This is a horror movie, and more akin to an indie horror flick at that. There are precisely two locations in the entire film: Dani’s reservation and the hospital. There are, as I mentioned above, only six characters in the movie (and a few supporting spooks). To see The New Mutants on the big screen—potentially in IMAX!—would feel like a massive disappointment. We’re coming off of Avengers: Endgame, the most throw-everything-on-screen-at-once movie of all time. And even Fox’s more genre-bendy and modestly budgeted mutant movies, Logan and Deadpool, had enough substance, enough jokes and fights and characters, to stretch out to fill the big screen. There just isn’t a lot in New Mutants in the vein of super-spectacle, and that’s because it’s—I can’t say this enough—a horror movie.

That manifests in the tone, which is creepy and dark instead of plucky or fun. All of these characters are haunted, victims of their uncontrollable powers. Their origins were adapted with much more accuracy than comic fans are used to seeing in the X-films, but the film adds in even more death. But the biggest deviation from superhero norms is in the film’s structure. The action set pieces we’re used to seeing at the top and middle of a Marvel movie are replaced with… jump scares and creepy imagery as the kids’ pasts come back to physically haunt them. That’s it. These aren’t ass-kickers and they aren’t here to save the world. They’re scared teens trying to not kill themselves or get killed. You wouldn’t expect to see Laurie Strode kick any ass before the final showdown in Halloween, and that’s New Mutants‘ vibe.

This is why the film actually works infinitely better the smaller it gets, because New Mutants actually does have enough going on to fill up a laptop screen. Freed from the implicit expectation of seeing massive slam-bang CG action that comes along with seeing the Marvel logo flash across a huge movie screen, New Mutants works wonderfully as exactly what it should have been all along: a straight-to-VOD horror movie.

The fact that The New Mutants has five distinct characters with individual personalities is, to be honest, a complete shock considering the abysmal track record previous mutant movies have with ensembles. Of particular note is the film’s central romance between Dani and Rahne, which writer/director Boone teased in interviews. It is actually substantial and integral to the plot, and not just a bit of last-minute will-they/won’t-they winking that genre fans are painfully used to! And even better: it makes the subtext of the comics text, both honoring the source material and making it relevant for today.

Solid performances aside, The New Mutants still has plenty of flaws. While the characters have a voice, the dialogue is missing the kind of snarky spark that made teen ensembles like Buffy the Vampire Slayer click—and I make that comparison because The New Mutants forces you to make that direct comparison… twice. The film’s final showdown, while filled with a couple of moments that made me absolutely giddy as a lifelong X-fan, feels rushed, as if a lot of emotional payoff was edited out. There’s also a few “say what now?” plot holes that are distracting to the point of confusion and consternation (if the whole movie hinges on characters being trapped, you have to address one of those characters being a teleporter). Also fans who are familiar with the comics will see the film’s big twists coming in the first five minutes and spend the majority of the movie waiting for everyone onscreen to figure things out—but that may just be a problem for me, Mr. I Have An Entire Wall of X-Men Stuff in My Home.

The New Mutants is far from perfect. It’s far from the best X-Men film, but it’s also far, far from the worst. And, because 2020 can’t stop throwing curveballs at us, the film getting its widest release yet via VOD is actually the right move. Kinda like the Demon Bear itself, this movie is much more manageable the smaller it gets.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t let the negative reviews from the theatrical run get you down, because this would definitely be a SKIP IT if I’d shelled out the money to rent a car and trek to the nearest drive-in in August 2020 during the pandemic.

Wwatch The New Mutants on HBO Max