X-Men: Apocalypse

I didn’t lose any hair from it, but if I could erase this film from my memory, I'd do it immediately. It's nice that Singer doesn't use the joke about a threesome in a film where nothing really works. But compared to this mess, it looks like the work of a demigod. I experience the greatest moments of regret and helplessness in the character of Eric, for whom Singer and the rest prepared one of the worst rebirth scenes ever seen in comics (The Birds meets Polish Robin Hood). The casting of the new faces had to take place under the slogan "find the actor with the least amount of charisma". The crown is set by the "red jewel" of the film, the new Jean Gray, who resembles the bullied Mana from high school. One can't even feel bad for Oscar Isaac, because his mask allows him only one grimace (an angry overbite). What next? A bloated runtime that reflects the problem of many other blockbusters - they are awkwardly looking for an alibi for the final battle, in which the characters behave according to mysterious mechanics. Not that you can't justify the twists in retrospect, but the thin manure beforehand doesn't justify it. I'm glad Wolverine got his forest jogging - I wanted to run with him and leave the stuffed dogs far behind me. If only the film rewarded me with a spoiled visual, but almost everything here feels artificial. Remember how the other X-Men built a world that mattered? Characters who carried stories and weren't just hangers for super-abilities? Here, there is only effective enchanting - a fart transforms into an even bigger purple fart. I firmly hope that Bryan has finished building his shapeless pyramid for good. (07/01/2017)

Seduced by visions of billion-dollar sales, the people at Fox applied a Marvel-esque concept, and the result is a director's genocide of his own children. It consists of rejuvenating detailed heroes with interchangeable faces and letting them fly thoughtlessly among digital backdrops. Yet Singer forgets about his main asset - strong characters - meaning that there is a complete lack of attachments, motivations, and, heaven forbid, tension. The viewer is thus left with a producer film that perfectly hits its target audience for a hundred and fifty minutes (it's not boring for even a second), but one that also sells its own soul (key moments are alternated from the past) and leaves the broken hearts of fans of what has laboriously redefined the comic book genre for sixteen years to die in agony. (18/05/2016)

A gift for Bryan Singer. After contributing to the series with origin, key work, and crossover, the situation finally arises where he can rampage carelessly, break free from the chain, and simply shoot a pure team comic book. I knew from the announcement of the storyline that it wouldn't be routine, but that it would be one of the highlights of the entire universe, and I'm still breathless a day after seeing it. It's not just a clash with an unbeatable enemy, but also the way the heroes themselves are incorporated into it. There's no need to develop them because we've spent six movies with some of them and know what to expect from them. Magneto's next attempt to exit the scene, Raven's inability to cope with herself and with mutants as such, or the newly developing juniors portrayed by Scott and Jean are still storylines that complete the already perfect cocktail of characters and motifs. And when you add Quicksilver, the visit to Lake Alkali, or the astral confrontation of the strongest wills, X-Men: Apocalypse becomes the strongest superhero film at least of this year. (29/05/2016)

Let's face it: this movie isn't very good, but then again, I wasn't bored. Granted it had scenes where I'm not sitting in the cinema but at the PC, so I'm stomping them because their bullshit was unlistenable; on the other hand, it had a scene I'd like to see again, which of course is the one with the great music and the "express train". There's not much to say about the acting, the actors didn't really stand out, the story was kind of rubbish, but the music managed to draw you in. It's a heavy middling film that surprisingly didn't bore me too much; I only had to roll my eyes about three times. :-D Get over how illogical it was that a bunch of Polish workers could speak English (since we're on location and speaking a foreign language, let's play it to the hilt!), or that one randomly shot ordinary arrow (which wouldn't have a metal tip!) kills two birds with one stone, and it's a nice movie for an evening when you come home from work and just want to be entertained. 55%. (19/05/2016)

I have a soft spot for the X-Men, after all, they showed how to confidently make comic book adaptations, managing to make them smart and ambitious, stripping them of the label of children's entertainment. They've always been smarter, had better fleshed out characters, and didn’t care about black and white. That is, until recently, because X-Men: Apocalypse is a step backwards in everything I listed above. And a hell of a big one. The sixth X-Men movie feels like something that was made in the late 90s, a time when it wasn't the norm to have characters dealing with a crisis of faith (like Nightcrawler in X-Men 2), drawing on the political situation of the 70s (Days of Future Past), or wondering if mutation was a disease or evolution (more or less the entire original trilogy). Now we have a blue idiot who wants to destroy the world for his ego, and that's it. Bryan Singer and his team seem to have ditched what has always been their strength and made a generic blockbuster for a lot of money. Unfortunately, the director's action sequences never work as well as the character work, he doesn't quite master the digital effects either, and he's got a bunch of characters that are either underused or completely unnecessary. In the end, it turned out to be a mediocre quarter-billion dollar movie. Personally, I'm used to more from this franchise. A lot more. (15/05/2017)