Hello friends.

The following was to be the script to this week’s IN BOB WE TRUST, which would’ve been posted a few hours from now once it had been edited together. The subject was to be adding some context to some social media flaming I’ve been enduring for suggesting that, in the wake of Sunday’s ghastly events in Orlando re: the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history; it might be prudent for people presenting at the also-unfolding E3 conference to look at any of their trailers/showcases involving gunplay and ask “Is there anything in here that will make me look like an asshole today, in light of this?”

Since it was hard to think about anything else, I decided to turn elaborating on my feelings about the blowback my Tweet received and what it says about geek/gamer culture’s issue with empathy into an episode… only to discover when it came time to actually record the audio and put it together that there was just no way to make the seriousness of the subject-matter “gel” with my standard video presentation (i.e. jokey graphics, fast-delivery, etc) – and that in actually following through, I’d be (potentially, at least) engaging in the kind of good-intentions/poor-taste business I was questioning in the first place. So I decided not to.

There will be an episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this week, but it will arrive on Wednesday or late Tuesday night. My call, no one else’s, felt it was what was best. But for posterity’s sake (and because I feel it reads better in text format anyway, I’m presenting my thoughts as originally-scripted here. I hope you find something worthwhile in them, and apologize for the delay in episode production.

Thank you.

ORIGINAL “IN BOB WE TRUST” SCRIPT (w/ minor alterations for blog post form)

This review made possible in part through contributors to The MovieBob Patreon.

Good news! After nearly 3 decades of video game movis being terrible because they didn’t respect the actual games at all, we finally have one that’s just as if not substantially more terrible because it reveres the games entirely too much! And now that Goldielocks has had her nibble at the Mama Bear and Papa Bear side of the equation, we should be just about ready for some enterprising go-getter to swoop in all Baby Bear and get things just fucking right – hopefully? After all, the next couple of these on deck are based on Ubisoft franchises; and they’ve never been known to vanish eagerly up the industrial-strength vaccum-like asshole of their own self-important mythological pretense!

Sigh. Yes, WARCRAFT is a colossal, monumental, staggering disaster. 15 or so years from when Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and JK Rowling jointly planted their flags and kicked it all off, the Geek Age of Cinema finally has its answer to HEAVEN’S GATE (or, if we’re being generous, ONE FROM THE HEART): A film willed into being by a genuine visionary of a filmmaker whose unwavering confidence and utter, unapologetic, deeply-drawn love of the material has resulted in something that avoids being called a simple failure by being so visibly cherished by its makers. Too compelling in its misbegotten grandeur to be dismissed, too grim and determined of its own importance to be called a farce; the only fair description of WARCRAFT is a tragedy.

It can be exhilirating to watch a bad film fail – watching the apotheosis of every shitty, pandering, grim-n-gritty creative decision made in comics over the last 3 goddamn decades crash and burn in BATMAN V SUPERMAN has been, overall, a fucking perverse delight – but there’s no joy or even vindication to be found in WARCRAFT. It’s not just that so many people tried so hard and believed so much in this project that makes its collapse so sad, it’s that all that effort and belief is the main reason why it collapsed.

The fact of the matter is, WARCRAFT is the kind of bad movie that can only be made by fans – because you have to love something – really fucking love it – to the point of all-encompassing blindness to unwittingly yet so effectively smother it to death like this. This is video-game adaptation by way of the dad from THE LEGO MOVIE – a whole game’s worth of stuff that’s supposed to be fun all cragled into place so rigidly that it’s impossible to have fun with it: The characters are so arch the actors can’t move around inside them, the world has been so lovingly recreated you can practically see the museum display-ropes keeping everything from being handled and the dialogue practically chisels itself into the stonework for fear of a single line landing out of place. It’s clear that director Duncan Jones really wanted this to work – to make his mark, do something really different and set a new standard for blockbuster fantasy filmmaking… and geez, do you have to feel bad for this fucking guy, because what he’s managed to do instead is set a new standard for having missed the forest for the trees.

The flaws are baked in right from the get-go: WARCRAFT is, technically, a video-game adaptation… except somebody decided that instead of adapting a story from the games or even setting a new story in the world of the games, the place to start was retelling in pedantic BEAUTIFUL MIND-level detail – the setup of the original game – yes, this essentially an entire fucking movie’s worth of the kind of shit LORD OF THE RINGS blew through in bullet-points in the first two minutes of the first movie, or that STAR WARS wisely consigns to the opening title crawl. Previous video game movies may have failed because they were like watching someone else play the game, but WARCRAFT is like watching someone read the game’s instruction manual.

And that’s some heartbreaking shit, because it’s the kind of bad decision that only a truly lovestuck fan can make, assuming that the mechanics and mythology details are SO damn important that we need to learn every single piece of it rather than skipping ahead to the fucking interesting stuff. Make no mistake: This kind of attention to detail and narrowly-focused worship of the material is the reason that the armor and the weapons and the spells and the Orcs – holy shit are the Orcs amazing looking in this – all look so damn good… but it’s the exact wronginstinct for telling an interesting story.

Especially when the story already needs all the help it can get to be worth telling in the first place. Setting aside that for all its novelty the “World of Warcraft” is basically the same high-fantasy hodgepodge that every other kitchen-sink fantasy realm has aspired to post-Gygax; it’s still pretty astonishing to realize that once the movie is done introducing every location, race, faction, region, sect etc that someone seriously thought we needed two full hours to understand a plot that boils down to: “The Green Stuff Is Bad.”

Fine, it’s mythology… but mythology needs characters we can invest in, and apart from one early scene of an Orc couple just chilling and talking about life (which is probably the first and last moment where the film approaches “good”) there isn’t a single exchange between characters or line of spoken dialogue that doesn’t involve a character introducing themselves, explaining what’s going on, telling us what something is, how it works or where they have to go next. The screenplay is nothing but exposition, and the only thing that’s never explained is why the fuck we’re supposed to care beyond the supposedly edifying novelty of both the humans and the invading Orc army both being basically decent people trying to do right by their families and communities as opposed to the usual black and white morality associated with the genre.

Sadly, since none of these people ever register as actual fucking characters, all of that supposed moral gray area mainly boils down to the Orcs and the humans both being equally stupid; with the entirety of the would-be story tension resting on nobody noticing that the creepy Orc wizard building a giant magic-machine that runs on dead people and the creepy human wizard who fucked-off for a bunch of years and showed up again acting like a goddamn weirdo right when all the bad shit started might be the bad guys!

The closest we get to an actual character is Toby Kebbel as Durotan the Orc, in as much as he has the closest thing to a relatable storyline and because all the actually good stuff in the movie revolves around the Orcs – period. But for the most part we’re stuck with Travis Fimmel as a boring knight, Dominic Cooper as a boring king, Ben Schentzer as a mage and poor, poor Paula Patton struggling not to look stupid with inverted vampire fangs as a half-human/half-Orc lady Garona… who kind of feels like she should be the main character but then… isn’t.

None of these people manage to be interesting because they never get to talk about anything that isn’t tedious worldbuilding or exposition. At one point two characters suddenly seem to be involved romantically, and you could feel the audience come to life for the first time all night as everyone collectively looked at the person next to them and asked “Wait, when the fuck did that happen!?” Worse still, it all builds up to a chaotic climax full of death, betrayal, emotion, tragedy, huge stakes and grand self-sacrificing decisions that feel like they’d be the stuff of legends… if it was even remotely possible to give a shit who the fuck any of these assholes are or what the hell is going to happen to them. Even simply reacting to the ending feels like homework: “Okay, class – is this a sad ending? A happy ending? A cliffhanger? Or did they just run out of time?”

And despite all that, I still find myself wishing I could root for this fucking disaster just because Duncan Jones is so clearly talented and deserving of serious blockbuster clout, but… the most tragic thing about the film is how massively beyond his grasp it turns out to be. Sure, it’s possible taking this specific tone and route may have defeated any filmmaker, but whereas at the least the mostly-CGI scenes involving the Orcs or the (far too few) big scale battles at least look interesting… everything involving the humans or filmed on a practical set is staged and blocked in the most uninteresting ways possible. Everything plays flat, basic and dull, and it’s legitimately depressing seeing such dreary work come from the same filmmaker who brought such masterful command of cinematic language and scene geography to MOON and SOURCE CODE.

WARCRAFT wants to be big. It wants to be different. It wants to the be smarter, deeper, more meaningful breed of Summer blockbuster that explores ideas and asks questions. Unfortunately, the only questions that anyone will be leaving with “What the HELL did I just watch… and how the FUCK did it happen!?”

Because you demanded it!

It won’t surprise me if the overall consensus on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (just TMNT 2 from here out, okay?) is that it’s an improvement on the first film. It is – but only in the sense that the bar is already set so painfully low. The first film was a full-blown piece of shit – badly directed, badly scripted, poorly acted, edited into a clusterfuck to fix story problems that never should’ve made it that far to begin with and ugly to look at from top to bottom – this is seriously one of the worst production-designed series ever.

The sequel carries over all the pre-existing problems, but this time things are marginally better directed (however much of it was actually directed, since so much of it is so obviously comprised of bog-standard pre-viz) and they’ve imported a bunch of fanservice aimed squarely at the first-wave Millennial entertainment bloggers most likely to get assigned to review it by their Russian and/or Chinese owned traffic farm – er.. I mean, Perfectly Legitimate News Outlet so… yeah, the reviews will be better.

It’s still pretty fucking bad.

Yes, they clearly had more time to work on this one so it’s not quite as clunky and thrown-together as the original felt throughout, but an overriding sense of laziness and half-effort is still the name of the game. The plot (such as it is – see below) is an afterthought, the characterizations are basic to the point of parody (almost everyone introduces themselves with a description of their own personality and expected “arc”) and none of it ever manages to have any weight or feel like it’s supposed to matter – which I understand is a weird complaint to have about what’s ostensibly a kids movie, but like I said last time: Kids deserve better than this.

I mean, he first time they made this shit into a movie I was the kid and it was every bit as much of a cynical grab for my or rather my mother’s money for more licensed plastic Turtle crap; but at least they had enough respect for my hypothetical intelligence to slow the fuck down in Act 2 and have that quiet stretch at the farmhouse to develop the characters into something resembling depth. OR they figured that establishing emotional connection to the characters would generate even more devotion to the product line, but… look, the point is, “it’s just for kids” is not an excuse not to do your goddamn jobs – that kind of thinking is how you end up with tainted baby food.

Case in point: You might’ve been under the impression that there’s a new Shredder is this one… but it’s just a new actor supposedly playing the same part. Wasn’t Shredder a really old guy in the last one? Who fucking cares, right? And the Foot Clan are Ninjas again even though they were clearly black-ops mercenary guys in the last one because… okay, even I don’t care about that one at this point.

Anyway, the plot this time is that the Foot Clan wants to break Shredder out of prison by using an alien teleporter rebuilt by Tyler Perry’s mad scientist Baxter Stockman. But instead of sending Shredder where it’s supposed to, it drops him into another dimension where the cyborg dictator Krang tells him that the teleporter is actually part of a bigger teleporter whose pieces are scattered on Earth and if reunited will let him beam in and conquer the place, which Shredder agrees to do in exchange for help with his Turtle problem. Believe it or not, I’m pretty sure that ENTIRE goddamn setup plays out in less time onscreen than it just took me to describe it – and yet somehow the rest of the movie is still almost 2 hours long.

What passes for a “theme” intrudes on the proceedings when Shredder uses a serum from Krang to turn henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady into their cartoon selves, which apparently occurs by “regressing human DNA to its animal ancestry” which is not how that works but… whatever. The point is that for some reason this means the same serum could turn the Turtles into full-blown humans, the prospect of which divides the team ideologically because hey, if you’re going to steal a storyline from the fucking X-MEN movies, you might as well steal from the worst one… I guess?

It all feels phoned in and lifeless, save for the bizarre obsession the film has with reminding us that Bebop & Rocksteady really are BFF’s for life – in a movie that’s already much too long, it’s just bizarre that so much screentime is given over to two lumpy, farting CGI monstrousities engaging in endless Judd Apatow “bromance” improv. The rest of it is just mechanical as shit, a Mother Goose simple plot interrupted for scheduled interludes that feel dreamed up by a seven year-old who knows that a narrative needs character conflict to give it structure but doesn’t understand what any of that entails beyond cliches he’s seen in other movies.

The action scenes, once again, are a big fat letdown considering how much money got spent on the FX. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they decided to use motion-capture to create the Turtles or any of the shitty new villains since every big setpiece is the same bullshit mishmash of the characters flinging themselves through the air in weightless theme-park choreography designed to show off the 3D and not much else. The keep hammering the point home that these characters are ninja-master, but there’s almost zero martial-arts in either of these films so far – the fucking KUNG-FU PANDA movies have better hand-to-hand combat sequences, and their both basically cartoons.

Speaking of which, the garish aesthetic mismatch between the design and the narrative isn’t doing it any goddamn favors either: The story and characters are all pitched at the level of an audience that’s still shitting it’s Huggies, but the cinematography and editing make everything look so much like a faux-gritty cop show you expect the Dick Wolf logo to come up at any minute and the Turtles are all still overdesigned hulking brutes I can’t imagine NOT terrifying a small child in person, forget being embraced as a children’s merchandising icon – the resulting dissonance feeling like somebody dubbed a vocal track from BANANAS IN PAJAMAS over a particularly Ramsay-heavy episode of GAME OF THRONES.

Giving the dialogue some snap might’ve mitigated some of this, but the writing is uniformly bland and explanatory in a way that suggests everyone involved knows that the main function of this tossed-off kleenex full of turtle jizz (and every other third-tier tentpole franchise like it) is to suck up dollars from undiscerning overseas 4D “ride theater” audiences and figured they might as well make life easy for the poor souls who have to dub it all into Mandarin.

Oh yeah, Meagan Fox is also in this. I… once upon a time had some fucking douchey, not at all nice things to say about Meagan Fox early on in my criticism career that I’d pretty much take all the way back if I could. She’s not GOOD in this, don’t get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like she’s trying just a little bit harder than everyone else is. She almost certainly deserves a lot better than this… but, then, so don’t we all.

This review made possible in part by generous contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.

FYI: There have been questions re: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. recaps. Short answer: Yeah, Season 3 ultimately got so tiresome I couldn’t bring myself to do write-ups of it anymore. However, with the season now concluded, I will be addressing that on the next installment of this series, tentatively arriving one week from today. Stay tuned 🙂

Watch it now, in case Warner Bros’ bogus copyright claim goes through (if so, there is a Vimeo version.)

As ever, those who want to see more like this (at a more frequent rate) are encouraged to support The MovieBob Patreon.

NOTE: This was originally written as the script for a video, but I decided it read better than it sounded performed. As ever, if you like what I do here, there’s a MovieBob Patreon for that. 

Alright. The Internet is all up in arms because of the below video wherein a guy who reviews movies says he’s not going to review the GHOSTBUSTERS remake mainly for nostalgia/”respect-the-original” reasons (and will instead do a “non-review” seemingly mostly about the failed attempts to make a proper GHOSTBUSTERS III over the years); and I find the fallout interesting because half the web is celebrating: “Hooray! Famous Internet Man has joined our anti-feminist witch-hunt!;” while the other half is scolding him over:“Boo! Famous Internet Man joined their anti-feminist witch-hunt.”

Meanwhile, the gender-flip business of the remake doesn’t really come up other than a factual acknowledgment thereof in the actual video, making it nicely illustrative of the tiresome way discussion of this movie has become proxy-vs-proxy and not about the movie at all… but also of who’s to blame for that tiresomeness in the first place (HINT: It ain’t the so-called “SJWs.”) Anyway, there’s the video, my take after the jump.

So. Background: James Rolfe, probably still best known as the Angry Video Game Nerd and pretty-much the INVENTOR of the whole “pop-culture rant” internet video genre, put out a video where he announced he was going to do some kind of vaguely-defined “non-review” tie-in video to the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS because it looks really bad and he resents the idea of remaking it in the first place and would thus rather not watch it.

Which… I totally understand and think is pretty valid. I mean, look – I’m a film critic by trade and I’m generally of the opinion that everyone critic or not should experience as many things as possible and that goes double for things you assume you yourself won’t like I assume we’ve all read GREEN EGGS & HAM and I don’t have to explain the logic behind that further. BUT! It’s also true that not everyone CAN see everything and if you really do think something looks so beyond your capacity for enjoyment or rational engagement then maybe it’s best left to others every once in awhile.

To be frank – short of “not gonna watch it” I have a hard time disagreeing with most of his basic premise (though I’d like to think I wouldn’t have said it was “good” that Harold Ramis didn’t get to see the movie – that’s a bit much.) GHOSTBUSTERS is one of those all-time classics that shouldn’t be remade even if remaking it well was possible which it isn’t because the making of GHOSTBUSTERS was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios that can’t happen twice and GHOSTBUSTERS II is the proof of that. The remake they HAVE made thus far looks and sounds terrible both conceptually and based on the trailers, everything about it makes me embarrassed for the very talented cast that’s been assembled to put it together. It’s a movie that probably never should have happened, stands almost no chance of being worthwhile and thus far doesn’t even look like it’ll be good enough to be a “whatever, next movie.” The last time a movie project looked THIS bad top-to-bottom before its release was BATMAN V SUPERMAN and just look how that monstrosity turned out.

And yeah, I COMPLETELY “get” resenting remakes of classics because – yes – while a remake doesn’t make the original “disappear” it does often inject a sour note into the cultural history of something (fairly or not) at least for a little while. See: Today, when you talk about ROBOCOP, you kinda have to specify that you mean the good one from the mid-80s and not that godawful piece of garbage from last year. Or when you talk about HALLOWEEN and have to point out that you mean the John Carpenter movie and not the Rob Zombie one. It’s not a huge problem or a major tragedy but it DOES kind of suck that unless this remake is itself an outright classic which – no, it won’t be – any discussion of GHOSTBUSTERS will now have to specify whether you mean the remake or the good one.

Now look, I’m not here to “defend” The Angry Nerd OR start some kind of debate over all this or even really to talk about his thing at all. And before somebody brings it up YES, I understand that he’s doing a “bit” and the whole “principled stand against a remake of a classic” thing feels like basically a clever promo for a what sounds like a video more about the history of the failure to make GHOSTBUSTERS 3 while it was still possible that he probably wanted to do anyway. I get it – self-promotion is the business, the business is what it is and he’s been doing it longer than almost any of us.

What I do think is worth noting is that the “discussion” that spilled out of this continues to be all about sexist assholes in fan-culture clearly being upset at this movie because they recast it with women… and the fact of that BARELY came up at all in Rolfe’s video. Now, look – full disclosure: I know this guy, not super well but we’ve worked with a lot of the same people, have done a few of the same events, I always admired his work, he’s always been a good guy to me, I have ZERO reason to believe he has some kind of issue with women and the fact that he doesn’t bring it up at all bares that out: I take him at what looks to be his word that this is about remaking classics and not about gender politics or whatever.

But what’s interesting and also depressing is… it doesn’t really MATTER, does it? The remake of GHOSTBUSTERS became a proxy battlefield for political posturing pretty-much the minute it was announced because that’s the world we live in now, and that’s always a frustrating phenomenon because it involves weighing two equally true facts against eachother – Fact #1 being that issues like feminism, progress, social-justice etc are, objectively, more important than whether or not a movie is good; but Fact #2 being that the only fair way to judge a work of art is based on its intrinsic merits and not which “side” of some bigger, more important argument its quality or lack thereof backs up.

This is partially why you haven’t heard ME really have anything substantively to say about the movie up to this point: Honestly, I was rooting for it to be good (and still hope it is even though all possible signs point to “no”) because inverting the character-genders raised a lot of genuinely interesting possibilities and almost seemed like a good enough reason to remake a classic in the first place. And as soon as the awful trailers and the awful everything else started to roll in, y’know… I felt physically sick over it because I realized what we were now in for:

The same pissed-off woman-hating assholes that ran roughshod over video-game fandom last year and this year have managed to (improbably) turn the otherwise well-intentioned Presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders (of all people!) into a fucking punchline are going to climb all over this movie sucking as ammunition for their bullshit cause, which means the GOOD people on the other side will either feel compelled to jump in and “defend” this or get sucked in otherwise because it becomes the new talking point of the moment.

And while that’s annoying on all fronts, I’m not trying to make a false equivalency here: I HATE the fact that we can’t have an honest back and forth about this or any other movie without having to think about whether or not what we say is going to get repurposed a weapon in a bullshit “culture war,” but I know who’s to blame for it – and it aint’ the so-called “SJWs.”: It’s the regressives and the trolls and fedora squad and the MRA/”meninist” right-wing internet collective that’s been banging on about this shit ever since they realized that the inexorable tide of cultural evolution is poised and ready to sweep them and their bullshit played-out reactionary worldview into the dumpster of societal-obsolesence.

Because guess what: The remakes of ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL *both* looked just as bad as the new GHOSTBUSTERS looks (and spoiler: they WERE exactly as awful as they looked) – but I don’t remember a year-long preemptive, pre-TRAILER hate campaign against those movies; so logically there’s obviously something else at play here – and while it’s true that Chris Hemsworth being in a movie where he’s NOT playing Thor is usually a bad sign… I kinda don’t think it’s that.

So… yeah. You think the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS looks terrible? I agree – it looks terrible. I just hope it doesn’t stop people from putting Leslie Jones Kate McKinnon in good movies because those are two funny fuckin’ people. You think it looks super-disrespectful to the legacy of one of the most important genre-comedies ever made? Yeah, I think that looks to the most-likely case. Don’t wanna watch it because of that? Fine – totally valid, you do you. But please, don’t you DARE insult either of our intelligences by trying to tell me that *most* of the super over-the-top mega-hatred that’s being trained on this project and RUINING any chance to have an honest discourse isn’t mainly coming from paranoid sexist assholes who think something is being “stolen” from them.

Egh… can we just get this over with? And by this, I mean can we just fast-forward to five years from now when we’ll be able to find out what everyone REALLY thought of this movie?

P.S. Since it’s relevant, my original “Really That Good” episode on the original GHOSTBUSTERS. For those wondering: RTG: “Superman: The Movie” is in-production and should be done soon, Yes, I am aware it took longer than I wanted it to. As ever, if you enjoy the work and want to encourage more, please consider The MovieBob Patreon.

Video Review Coming Soon. Enjoy this review? Please consider a contribution to The MovieBob Patreon.

Broken record time: There are plenty of pre-modern (read: prior to BATMAN BEGINS/IRON MAN) superhero movies that absolutely hold up. Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN is one. The 1978 SUPERMAN is one. BATMAN RETURNS… sort of. The first two BLADE movies, definitely – I know we’re only “supposed” to like BLADE II because of Guillermo del Toro, but the first one is totally serviceable.

But the X-MEN movies? No. They don’t hold up. Portions of them do: McKellan’s Magneto is a hell of a performance, Jackman as Wolverine was a great discovery, Patrick Stewart is… basically doing exactly what you expected, so it’s fine. Zeroing in on the gay-youth metaphor was a good idea. Sort-of-nude Mystique is iconic. X2 has a decent-ish screenplay, which helps alot. But taken as a whole? Only FIRST CLASS is a straight-up good movie, and THE WOLVERINE is 2/3rds of a good B-movie. The rest of them are varying degrees of straight-up bad (ORIGINS: WOLVERINE and X3 being the worst) – aesthetically ugly, blandly directed, filler-packed half-efforts of which X2 gets a pass because it’s screenplay is good enough and restricting 90% of the action to the X-Mansion, underlit hallways and… more underlit hallways helps disguise Bryan Singer’s inability to properly direct action sequences or really any sequence with more than one plane of action and more than three active characters.

(SPOILERS after the jump)

And look, I get it: For a moment there, this looked like the best we could’ve possibly hoped for, isolated scenes like Wolverine defending the Mansion and Iceman “coming out” to his parents are damn close to transcendent and seeing the Phoenix shape under the water was Nick Fury before Nick Fury. I was there, too, I understand. But I’ve also lived through the decade-plus hence with clear eyes, and apart from FIRST CLASS (again, the only good one) the only thing more disappointing in hindsight than the totality of the X-MEN movies is the whole idea of Bryan Singer being a major talent as opposed to an unspectacular point-and-shoot dramatist of what we used to call TV-level visual chops.

What I’m saying is: It’s okay to let this series go. I understand why we cling to it, but enough is enough. Propping up this franchise in 2016 is like unironically propping up HAWK THE SLAYER after LORD OF THE RINGS.

But whatever. Thanks to DEADPOOL we’re going to keep getting these now in one form or another, even as it begins to feel more and more like Fox intends to jog in place accomplishing nothing special (the next movie will apparently be set in the 90s to maintain whatever the nonsensical continuity is now) for the main series while they wait for Disney/Marvel to make them a Spidey-style shared custody offer; so it’s time to watch the surviving FIRST CLASS actors team up with the new baby-faced versions of the Parts 1-3 characters whose actors have aged out of the franchise for what amounts (in terms of actual plot) to a 2 1/2 hour explanation for why Professor Xavier went bald early. Riveting.

Any pleasures to be had amid this tedium are strictly of the ironic variety. Specifically: It’s enormous fun to watch poor Oscar Isaac (usually one of the most expressive and versatile actors working today) stomp around looking like a 1970s SUPER SENTAI villain in absurdly fake-looking prosthetic makeup and plastic armor (there isn’t a single prop, set, costume or makeup effect in the film that doesn’t look Schumacher-BATMAN-level phony) as Apocalypse, supposedly “The First Mutant” and our basis for various myths about gods and demons etc. Buried alive in Ancient Egypt, he wakes up in the alt-reality 1980s created by DAYS OF FUTURE PAST’s time-travel meddling and decides that humanity has fucked up the planet so bad that he needs to blow everything up and start over as Mutant God again; so he assembles a team consisting of Storm, Angel, Magento and newbie mutant Psylocke and supercharges their powers to help him kidnap Professor X so that he can hijack his mind-powers to find and manipulate every mutant on Earth at once because that’s exactly what the bad guys did in X2 and that was the last time anyone not named Matthew Vaughn made a good X-MEN movie.

Meanwhile, plot contrivances (and contractual obligations) bring Mystique (J-Law again, somehow affecting her most vacant, disinterested thousand-yard-stare yet) back to the Xavier School at the same relative time as the new Barely Legal versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler are all turning up along with still-mindwiped Moira MacTaggart, who wants help running down Apocalypse and Magneto – who’s evil again because he moved to Poland and tried to start a family and just guess how that ended up. It’s all just a lot of marking time until Apocalypse can show up and blow the school to smithereens, compelling Mystique to get over her resistance to heroism (young mutants now hero-worship “The Blue Woman” as a Che-style revolutionary icon that she wants no part of) and re-assemble The X-Men in order to rescue Charles and beat Apocalypse…

…but only after an insultingly-pointless, utterly unnecessary plot detour during which the main good guys are abducted by Baby General Stryker and whisked off to an underground facility exclusively so that they can bump into Hugh Jackman for about two minutes of bloodless Wolverine cameo-carnage and then promptly hurry back on their way to back to the main storyline. It’s as nakedly awkward as I’m making it sound, reeks of post-production interference and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out it was all created in reshoots – and yet, somehow, Wolverine still has more actual bearing on the plot than (Arch?)Angel, Storm and Psylocke; none of whom serve even a contrived purpose since Apocalypse’s big scheme is essentially: Super-Magneto destroys the world with Earthquakes.

On balance it’s not quite as disastrously bad as X3 and just about even with ORIGINS: WOLVERINE in terms of enthusiastically-boneheaded stupidity, to the point where it might even be “fun” after a fashion if Singer was a better director of spectacle or had the capacity to have genuine fun within the genre. Unfortunately, APOCALYPSE has clearly been designed with the aim of aping the structure/tone of the most-recent Marvel features – read: witty banter, elaborate fight sequences, Lucky Charms color-palette, a giant climactic fight scene in the middle of basically the whole damn world exploding into pixel showers in the background – which would make for a headache-inducing clash with Singer’s prevailing “sullen-Ambercrombie-models-looking-pouty” aesthetic that it likely wouldn’t have looked good if he could direct it properly – which he can’t.

It’s honestly shocking just how bad the “big” moments of the film look, particularly a third act mega-brawl set in a blown-to-bits Cairo. Outrageously poor green-screen compositing and lighting/lensing choices seemingly designed to highlight how fake everyone looks (poor Olivia Munn looks like she’s posing for an expensive-for-2002 cosplay shoot) would be forgivable with even a minimum of visual flourish, but the composite/soundstage/CGI mix is so stagey and basic that your average Sid & Marty Kroft show was overall more inventive about disguising their plate-shots. Fassbender’s Magneto, hovering unconvincingly amid swirling digital chaos, looks less like a Horseman of The Apocalypse than he does a badly-dressed many giving a TED Talk about advances in particle-FX animation.

In a moment that crystallizes the “soulless xerox of an MCU entry” sensibility intrinsic to the whole enterprise, the film opts to insert it’s requisite Stan Lee cameo not into the margins or a tension-relieving “funny” scene; but into one of the most (theoretically) dramatic moments possible – garaunteeing gufaws from the audience at one of the least opportune times. By the same token, since everybody (but me) made an obnoxiously big deal out of the Quicksilver slo-mo scene in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, we get two more of them here: One of which turns what should be a big deal plot point into a jokey “Ha! I remember that 80s song!” spotfest, the other of which serves to render him so overpowered it feels pointless to have any other X-Men around – even if everyone didn’t keep forgetting which powers they have until they need it for a specific beat.

The only question I end up having as all of this dull drivel winds down is whether or not having to follow one of the best recent superhero movies (CIVIL WAR) and one of the all-time worst (BATMAN V SUPERMAN) to theaters works out against the film or in its favor. I’m on record not believing in “superhero fatigue,” but X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is exactly the kind of movie that under the right circumstances could get me way down in the dumps about the genre – it’s not even bad enough to make for interesting “how did this abomination happen!?” discussion like BVS or FANT4STIC. There’s no mystery to how pointless, uninspired fare like this get’s made – or to why there’ll almost certainly be more of it before we’re through.

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