Critic Reviews

If New Mutants is any indication, the future is bright for young adult horror, even when that future is being carved out of the husk of billion-dollar properties. Here’s to the future audiences who will unleash their inner fear bears.

The New Mutants didn’t deserve to be locked away for years. It’s not some unwatchable mess but rather a perfectly fine, entertaining, if at times formulaic small-scale genre movie.

The scares are more textural than truly creepy, and they’re certainly overshadowed by what’s primarily a character piece, with each person’s fears and anxieties literally manifesting as part of the storyline.

Boone’s film does demonstrate that there are different ways to approach these franchises outside of the binary of lighthearted/fun and dark/gritty movies that permeate the superhero genre.

This film is no masterpiece, but the franchise has mutated, just a little.

While it’s never actively bad, The New Mutants rarely imbues any of its happenings with any real heft. Like the remote hospital that serves as its setting, the film as a whole feels too closed off from the rest of its fictional universe to matter much.

Generic and, at its best, straining to be heartfelt.

Re-shot, re-cut and somehow rescued from total obscurity, Boone’s movie isn’t half bad. Alas, it’s not half good either. It’s basically just decent enough to motivate those sick of shutdown to risk getting sick for real.

If this were a pilot for a TV series, home audiences might be willing to baby it along until it grows stronger. As a stand-alone movie, this particular mutation looks like a badly-adapted dead-end.

Director Josh Boone’s goal was to jettison the usual comic-book trappings and make The New Mutants a horror film. He succeeded on the first part, but not the second. Nothing is scary or heroic. Perhaps unsurprising coming from the guy who directed “The Fault in Our Stars,” it’s all teenage troubles: love, sex obsession, a tinge of self-harm.