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Over in Cairo, CIA agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) is investigating religious mutant cults, and accidentally uncovers the buried temple of En Sabah Nur. I mean “accidentally uncovers” almost literally; if I’m not mistaken, her actions are directly responsible for his discovery and subsequent reawakening. Now played by Oscar Isaac under several pounds of rubbery prosthetics and makeup, he begins to recruit mutants as acolytes to put his grand plan into motion. What is this plan? It involves something about cleansing the entire planet of all life, or some life, or the weak. This rather expectedly escalates into something resembling all-out war between good and evil. Why is this his plan? See Paragraph B, Sentence 5. I say it’s because he woke up, took a look at himself in the mirror, and said, “Well, why not?” How droll it would be to have an ancient evil being wake up after thousands of years of slumber and escape their enchanted prison to discover that the world is already exactly what they were envisioning, and there’s nothing really left to do but build a nice throne and be served delicacies. Discerning readers will note that my opinion of the film appears to be slipping southward.

In the best of the X-Men movies, each character has a bit of background or motivation for why they do what they do, even the bad guys. Just for fun, let’s take a look at X-Men: The Last Stand, so clearly the most maligned of the direct sequels (undeservedly so, in my opinion) that this film makes an oblique crack about it. In that 2006 film, you had the character of Angel as a confused and frightened kid grown into a confused and frightened adult. He didn’t get much screen time, but there was a conveyance of raw and unmodulated emotion, obviously directed at him alternately hiding from and seeking approval from his father. It was an effective manifestation of both the character and a character arc.

Or what about Rogue’s struggle with whether or not to take the mutant “cure”? In both cases (and others), we had talented actors utilizing competent screenwriting to open a window for us into their character’s minds. There is no such limited sophistication to be found here; we are given brief flashes of mutant introduction and quick displays of mutant power, so perfunctory in its character interest that popular characters like Psylocke might as well be replaced by mo-cap dots with on-screen text stating, “Insert SFX Here”. The lucky characters are the ones who get to express a sentence or two’s worth of thought (it’s a cruel joke that most of these end up with Lawrence - who also happens to turn in what might be her most shockingly detached and ineffectual performance in years, or ever) before the fireworks take over.

And there are so, so many fireworks. There are way too many fireworks, all of them obtrusively clad in slick, shiny, and somehow insubstantial CGI. We have reached the point in these types of films, I believe, where a protracted sequence involving a collapsing city requires more intelligent exploration of mood and consequence in order to be effective; it is not enough to simply ramp up the destruction, or plant the camera and show lots and lots of light beams and crumbling structures. The prosthetic work fares no better; how many hours Isaac - a charismatic and dynamic presence - must have spent in the makeup chair. The final result makes him look, yes, like a villain from the old Power Rangers TV series. There’s something wrong when the mere sight of your apocalyptic, all-powerful villain walking around in daylight elicits indifference, and at no point intimidation. There is none of the quiet menace of Ian McKellen’s Magneto, or the near-religious fanaticism of Brian Cox’s Stryker, nor the perversion of scientific curiosity by Peter Dinklage’s Bolivar Trask. He’s just a big, egocentric demagogue with cataracts and a cape. Subtract the last two, and we have national politics for that.

There was real enthusiasm when director Bryan Singer returned to the helm for Days of Future Past; maybe he tapped out on creative energy shepherding that one to the screen. Or maybe nobody dared to second-guess him or the writers at the screenplay stage. Whatever the case may be, this is a deflated misfire. We get the hints of a good story, and we are disappointed as it’s steadily replaced with characters making grand pronouncements they’ve grandly pronounced before, making oblique references to things they’ll do in later timelines or alternate universes (which we’ve already seen), and firing off lukewarm quips and winks to the fans in the audience, all in undistinguished manner in flat settings, with overheated visuals, at several decibels louder than necessary. It’s no fun.

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