★★☆☆☆

Had I found an easy way to generate 2.5 stars I might have given X-Men: Apocalypse that rating. This wasn’t quite as bad a movie as 2 stars makes it sound. It also isn’t something you should leap to put on your rental list. My biggest problem with this movie is the franchise keeps jumping around so much you really can’t tell what order to watch things. Since I’m not a 12 year old boy living and breathing comic books, I expect the franchise to keep the story line straight. Most of you will probably need a guide to help understand this rant.

Title Year Released
X-Men 2000
X2 2003
X-Men: The Last Stand 2006
X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2009
The Wolverine 2013
Logan 2017

Prequels

Title Year Released
X-Men: First Class 2011

Listed as Sequels:

Title Year Released
X-Men: Days of Future Past 2014
X-Men: Apocalypse 2016

We will skip the worthless “Deadpool” spin-offs for the purposes of this discussion.

So, the wheels came off the cart around 2010. You see, that is when the studio decided the whole X-Men Origins: thing was just a one-off for the Wolverine. Instead of keeping some semblance of sanity by calling it “X-Men Origins: First Class” they just called the next movie X-Men: First Class.

Now two things happened which really screwed the pooch.

  1. I had never heard of X-Men: Apocalypse
  2. The walk-in rental place had Logan at eye level.

Needless to say I watched Logon a month or so ago and just watched X-Men: Apocalypse in the past few days.

Spoiler Alert

They kill off Hugh Jackman. Hey, I can understand. He has been playing Wolverine for 17 years now and at some point, even if you don’t get bored with making all of that money, the body starts to not recover from the punishment like it used to.

Hey studio! If you are going to jump around in the story lines make certain there is a “Watch in this order” guide published everywhere. It is amazing that in this day and age studio marketing departments _still_ think only about the box office and not the DVD/streaming market. Don’t you just love renting a years old movie and seeing a preview with a big splash “Coming in June”?

As far as this movie goes, it is pretty much all special effects. There is almost no personal relationship exploration. If you haven’t watched any of the earlier movies you are most likely going to be completely lost. This movie had no graceful entry point for the noob.

Ignorance will be a bliss though with respect to the I can teleport anywhere guy (Nightcrawler). A younger version of the guy is “newly discovered” in this installment, but wait! He was “newly discovered” in a previous movie when he tried to kill the President. This was billed as a sequel, not a prequel so . . .

No, now that I think of these things, it’s not a 2.5 star movie, just a 2.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.