Teenage mutant ‘80s dance party

One of the few unvarnished pleasures in watching this week’s Marvel superhero outing, X-Men: Apocalypse, is that you get to see Game of Thrones’ mousy redhead Sophie Turner morph into someone fiery and kick-ass.

That’s right. Sansa Stark gets to be Khaleesi for a day.

Otherwise, it seems like another week, another Marvel movie. You could say the continued and unimpeded success of superhero flicks is a little like the appeal of Donald Trump: easy to explain, easy to make fun of — and very hard to stop.

Like The Donald, Marvel flicks may spin out variations on the same old narrative and message long after it’s worn out its welcome — yet some, like the recent Captain America: Civil War, show more panache than others. Doesn’t stop people from lining up, though. The true appeal — also echoing Trump — lies in Marvel’s near-rabid fan base. Those fans are not going to let anything stand in the way of another huge, rage-fueled spectacle. Same with Trump fans.

So, after a brief prologue in 3300 BC Cairo, we return once again to the confines of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, where X-Men: Apocalypse quietly unfolds. (Hmmm… “Apocalypse.” That word’s getting way overused in Hollywood; the Marvel subtitles are going to have to go bigger. Maybe X-Men: Fiery, Nerve-Jangling Incineration of All Living Things on the Face of the Earth hammers home the message better.)

Here we see the X-Men in their early days: fledglings gathering up their mutant powers as ‘80s teens, surrounded by towering hair, stone-washed denim and folded-up sleeves, not to mention a new wave soundtrack. (Scene-stealer Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has another memorable moment of bullet-time trickery set to the tune of Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams.)

The fun part is how the X-Men origins movies get to decade-hop, taking us back through ‘70s politics, fashion and music in 2014’s Days of Future Past, then jumping forward a decade into the era of Ronald Reagan, Brezhnev and Cold War threats. The confusing part is how different actors tend to play the same X-Men characters from reboot to reboot (Mystique = Rebecca Romijn = Jennifer Lawrence; Dr. Jean Grey = Famke Janssen = Sophie Turner); yet Wolverine is always Hugh Jackman, oddly more grizzled and aged in his earlier ‘80s incarnation here.

Back in Ancient Egypt, we learn that En Sabah Nur (played with fixed sneer and accent by Oscar Isaac) is preparing to leap into eternity by absorbing the powers of those around him — a knack he intends to use in spades when he awakens in the 1980s, surrounded by mutants whom he enlists to help him “cleanse” the planet in a fiery armageddon, presumably after getting a full dose of PacMan, Eurythmics and stone-washed denim. With his blue alligator pharaoh get-up, his chosen monicker is Apocalypse, apparently an inspiration for Biblical and other prophecies of doom throughout history.

Enter Dr. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), who goes from ‘80s Don Johnson-in-a-wheelchair attire to full-on bald pate over the course of the movie. (The cause of his baldness is a little sketchy. Isn’t baldness, like mutation, a matter of genetics?)

Also enter Olivia Munn as Psylocke, a minion of Apocalypse, looking fetching/dangerous while cracking a laser whip in leather attire, though her acting is about as expressive as the chiseled hieroglyphics at the opening of the film.

X-Men: Apocalypse hopes to continue the revitalizing of the franchise that director Bryan Singer managed with Days of Future Past, but for casual fans it might just seem like more of the same ramalama. A lot of crash-boom, very little provoking of thought. There’s a definite going-through-the-motions vibe here, though it at least eschews the more obvious political parallels that a movie like Batman Vs. Superman traded in, which is probably wise this close to voting season. Hedging your bets is a good tactic for humans, as well as mutants. 

A huge assortment of players fills the screen, including chameleon-like Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert, Xavier’s love interest; there’s Kodi Smit-McPhee as blue-faced Nightcrawler, Josh Helman as Colonel Stryker (an archvillain in the making), and of course Michael Fassbender returning as the deeply wounded Eric Lehnsherr, better known to the world as Magneto. In fact, much of the story focuses on Magneto’s piled-up losses and his switch from Team Xavier to Team Apocalypse. Fassbender’s earnest emoting in some scenes is cranked up so high, it’s like nobody told him this is just another summer action film. Jennifer Lawrence, also never guilty of phoning in a performance, is placed in the position of being a rallying point for other young mutants, a situation not unlike her Katniss Everdeen character in that other blockbuster franchise, Hunger Games.

You expect a lot more to work here, with such an impressive cast, but it feels more like a Marvel stopgap outing. Isaac is just a giant pill as Apocalypse, dialing back every ounce of his comedic timing to play, basically, a big blue alligator who wants the world to commit suicide. Makes you want to rewatch Star Wars: The Force Awakens again, just for a chuckle. Sure, Munn rocks that leather outfit and does lethal very well; and yes, it’s an inside-joke pleasure to see the least lethal Game of Thrones damsel finally bust out some furious anger upon her enemies, but other than that, you’d get just as much of a charge by playing your Eurythmics CDs.