CAPSULE: X-Men Apocalypse (2016, Dir. Bryan Singer)

You know film critics talk amongst themselves, don't you? I'm not saying it is some kind of critical conspiracy, just that you tend to bump into the same people over and over again at film screenings. You tend to bump into the same people over and over again at screenings of superhero movies. And you tend to have the same conversation with the same people at superhero movies over and over again.

"Are you excited for this?"

"Eh, kinda."

"I sorta enjoy them while I'm in it."

"Time to switch the brain off..."

Again. This was the general gist of the discussion before Bryan Singer's latest prequel-sequel '80s comic-book-hero-crammed destructo-porn fest, X-Men Apocalypse. The same faint hope. The same "gotta give it a go at least" attitude.

I'm not sure if this pre-film apathy coloured my view of what I ended up seeing (I don't think my attitude is a lurid purple) but it appears Singer's franchise, and we'll call it Singer's because he has the biggest hand in it, is becoming just as apathetic.

The motivations for one. We're still on the hamster-wheel of evil mastermind Magneto finding his evil mastermind mojo though a series of self-sabotaging acts of kindness-turned-barbarity. This time around he loses a wife and child in Poland and takes it out on the mob of police who misguidedly hand him the pre-requisite reason to jump back on the waaAAAaaaAAaahhhhmbulance.

I can be flippant because, despite Michael Fassbender's committed performance, we've been over this every single fucking time. We know how it turns out, so it is all cosmetic - in a lipstick on a super-pig way. That this time around Magneto's powers are amplified into world magno-crushing intensity by giant purple Oscar Isaacs, adds little to the gravitas. Not since we've seen it all before (and though it wants to distance itself from X-Men: The Last Stand, that's the film's most defining reference point).

And we've not just seen it all before, we've heard it all before. Singer and his screenwriter, Simon Kinberg, even underscore this by going over every other conversation Fassbender and James McAvoy's hand holding Charles Xavier have shared on the topic. "Come back to us... There's still good in the world... I know they hurt you but you have family that loves you still... Give me a hug..."

Honestly, they're so repetitive they sound like a bunch of film critics talking before superhero movie screening.

"But, I did sorta enjoy it while I was in it."

★★☆

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