X-Men: Apocalypse

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a little bit different. It all started when I was a kid and I religiously and almost defiantly wore British Knights to the playground while everyone else rocked Jordans or the Nike Air Pump shoes. And it continued in high school when I chose to go with the Gumby hairdo and listened to obscure RnB music as I drove around town looking for parties while everyone else blasted Green Day or some awful country music. So it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that every time my buddies and I went to a pool hall, I’d be the one who’d put on Radiohead’s creepiest (no pun intended) songs like Climbing Up the Walls on the jukebox when everyone else simply wanted to hear Def Leopard or White Snake.

This natural inclination to be different explains why I still watch the Cosby Show with no shame while everyone tries to vilify me for it. I have no problems separating fantasy from reality; I’m watching and adoring Heathcliff Huxtable, not Rapey Mcraperson Bill Cosby. And why should I be ashamed of it? X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer has been quietly linked to these super secret Hollywood pedophile parties for years now and was almost brought up on charges for it a few years back, yet he’s able to still make movies. Heck, as a matter of fact people turned out by the thousands to see X-Men opening weekend. So just like Jesus Quintana was allowed to keep bowling in the league in the Big Lebowski, Bill should be allowed to keep entertaining me.

So with that said, I feel as though I have a special bond with the X-Men as in I too know what it’s like to be viewed as different from the rest of society. Oh and the fact that I’m a minority also helps but whatever. The past few movies have kind of thrown me for a loop with all of the time traveling and the converging of the old series and the new, but for the most part I’ve been able to keep up. It’s just that at some point the stories are going to be so convoluted that the movies will have to be as long as Dances with Wolves was just so they can get everyone their agreed upon airtime.

Well thankfully in Apocalypse they kind of cooled it with the complex storylines and simply focused on the original mutant Apocalypse himself. However that was one of only a few good decisions the writers and the makeup artists made with this film. It’s never a good thing when a movie reminds you of Superman: The Quest for Peace, Battlefield Earth, or Dark City; and sadly the latest installment of X-Men reminded me of all three. For whatever reason they decided to make Apocalypse look like Jim Carey’s version of The Mask and the uber-talented Oscar Isaac was forced to deliver these cheesy condescending one liners to us stupid man animals.

It’s the same problem The Avengers series is having with Vision; both he and Apocalypse’s powers are so great that they don’t quite know where to start with or how to properly portray them on screen. So they’re just stuck stalking around like idiots wearing these outfits that remind me of awful Halloween costumes drunk frat boys put together at the last minute. "Hey at least this way Becky won’t yell at me and I’ll still get to have sloppy drunken sex later!" Honestly, Vision would be way more entertaining if he talked like that. But I digress.

The X-Men are forced to ban together to help stop Apocalypse after he returns from his hibernation to destroy the world and everyone in it. By the way, I’ve always thought that this was a ridiculous plan simply because once everyone is dead, you’re just going to walk around your new planet with your four remaining friends? How boring is that? But who cares what I think, that was this moron’s plan.

It takes all of the X-Men to fight him because Apocalypse has the ability to transfer his consciousness into the body of other mutants and at the same time acquire their special abilities. Now this sounds cool but apparently all that amounts to is his having the ability to turn everything into quicksand and forcing every one of his opponents to effectively suffocate to death. And trust me when I say it’s a lot lamer on screen than it sounds here. There are a few cool action set pieces, especially towards the end in the film’s major battle scene, but outside of that and the trick they do with Quicksilver (something we saw in Days of Future’s Past) the rest of the movie is a snoozefest. It also doesn’t help that 90% of the cast can’t act. Out of respect for them, I won’t name names but let’s just say that after watching this atrocity I’m a little more sympathetic towards Ramsey’s (Game of Thrones) character than I was walking in.

This is a forgettable film and barely beats the disaster Brett Ratner put together in 2006. I rate this movie as WEAK and suggest you get drunk by the pool this Memorial Day weekend instead.