Evan Peters once again walks away with the whole show as Quicksilver, essentially repeating his cameo from the last film with a breathtakingly explosive set piece. Instead, it falls to the younger cast to keep us amused, from Tye Sheridan’s uncertain Cyclops to Sophie Turner’s timid telepath. Oscar Isaac, perhaps for the first time in his career, is the weakest link in the ensemble, frowning and sighing his way through a part that never delivers on its symbolic promise – ideas of worship, evolution, genetics and power are all thrown up in the air, then cast aside like Rogue in Days of Future Past. And so we’re treated to what is essentially a two-hour montage of our purple people-eater teleporting around the world in a massive bubble, recruiting henchmen (and henchwomen) to his Ivan Ooze lookalike competition. That interplay between fact and fiction pays off in greater dividends when we catch up with Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who revisits the Holocaust flashbacks of X-Men for a cathartic piece of destruction.īut while X-2 and that initial entry played upon social insecurities to subtle effect, Apocalypse only dwells briefly (and unsubtly) on any serious themes, instead preferring to get on with ushering in its titular armageddon. “I’ve never felt power like this before,” gasps James McAvoy’s Professor X – in the face of Apocalypse’s abilities, the idea of mankind ending the world seems suddenly puny. Strangelove-esque war room and an inspired use of ballistic missiles make the context as witty and relevant as ever.
It’s great to see, then, that after Matthew Vaughns’s First Class, X-Men jumps forward 20 years from the Cold War to full-on nuclear scare – even if the cast barely look like they’ve aged two weeks, let alone two decades, scenes in a Dr. Singer has always had a talent for mining history for entertainment, from Valkyrie to X-Men’s opening scene in World War II.
A swift bit of sabotage later and he’s trapped forever, only to be unearthed by a devoted team of fanatics – because there’s always a devoted team of fanatics – in the 1980s. Things begin extremely promisingly, with a prologue set in 3600 BC, when Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) is doing the things that all mutants used to do in ancient Egypt: lording it over the locals, hanging out in fancy pyramids and transferring his consciousness into other mutants whenever he gets old so he can keep on living forever. Sure enough, things descend into one big virtual punch-up over the two-hour-plus runtime, but there’s much to enjoy in the carnage. X-Men: Apocalypse, though, does a very good job of almost rivalling Ratner’s hot CGI mess with its own hot (more coherent) CGI mess – a reminder that writer Simon Kinberg penned both, as well as DoFP (and, incidentally, This Means War and Jumper). And some jokes about that Brett Ratner sequel. After the timey-wimey complexities of that convoluted retcon, though, X-Men: Apocalypse marks a return to simpler ideas: a giant, blue guy trying to destroy the world and a school-load of good mutants trying to stop him.
“The third one’s always the worst,” quips Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) halfway through X-Men: Apocalypse – just in case you hadn’t already guessed that director Bryan Singer didn’t like Brett Ratner’s The Last Stand from the fact that he invented an entire film (Days of Future Past) to eradicate it from existence.
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Watch X-Men: Apocalypse online in the UK: Disney+ / Apple TV (iTunes) / Prime Video (Buy/Rent) / TalkTalk TV / Rakuten TV / Google Play Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Oscar Isaac, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender
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