'The New Mutants' - Movie Review

I almost always check Rotten Tomatoes before watching a movie. Their consensus on this one was "Rendering a list of potentially explosive ingredients mostly inert, The New Mutants is a franchise spinoff that's less than the sum of its super-powered parts." Their summaries are usually pretty good, and in this case it's dead on the money.

We start with Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt), whose parents and entire reservation village die in ... an event, that's initially labelled "a tornado." She's the sole survivor, and wakes to find herself at a "hospital" with precisely one creepy "doctor" (Alice Braga). There are four other mutant teens being held there, each with their own tragic backstory - every one of them had killed someone (or several people) when they came into their powers. Nightmarish things start happening at the hospital, until it all escalates ...

With a diverse cast of teen heroes who stomp all over each other's emotions and frailties, and an authority figure who's trying to control them all ... they should have been able to craft an exciting story. And yet this falls flat on its face. All the character interactions are generic teen bickering, and the "scares" are classic (ie. well-known and no longer scary) moves from every horror movie past. The acting isn't terrible but it's certainly not great, and even if it was I don't think that could have fixed this. "Inert" is the right word.