The stakes got upped a bit in the previous entry and so I must say I was worried about the endless stake-upping occurring in this series, like it does with the Avengers movies. And, to an extent, the stakes are indeed upped passed the point of sanity. The bad guy is a different kind of world-threatening baddie this time, but at least he’s different, I guess.

Because the X-Men series plays with time so much, it avoids much of the repetition dooming the Avengers films to perpetual mediocrity. (As I said, the stake-upping is also really, really repetitive.) But this particular installment is the first film in a bit to feel repetitive to me. This film fits in with the other movies a little better, for me personally, because I know the general comics story-lines better than the other comic book series right now (only because of the X-Men cartoon series) but it still feels like parts of previous X-Men stories assembled together, and all the familiar notes are hit, in a less effective way than the last time.

The other thing is that the battle within the consciousness of the bad guy is pretty fucking dumb.

I still prefer these films to the other Marvel movies, on the whole, but this is not a great one.

5/10

• Directed by Bryan Singer
• Produced by Simon Kinberg, Bryan Singer, Hutch Parker, Lauren Shuler Donner

• Screenplay by Simon Kinberg, Story by Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Based on X-Men by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby

• Starring:

  • James McAvoy as Charles Xavier / Professor X

  • Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto

  • Jennifer Lawrence as Raven / Mystique

  • Oscar Isaac as En Sabah Nur / Apocalypse

  • Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy / Beast

  • Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert

  • Carolina Bartczak as Magda Lehnsherr

  • Evan Peters as Peter Maximoff / Quicksilver

  • Tye Sheridan as Scott Summers / Cyclops

  • Sophie Turner as Jean Grey

  • Olivia Munn as Psylocke

  • Kodi Smit-McPhee as Kurt Wagner / Nightcrawler

  • Alexandra Shipp as Ororo Munroe / Storm

  • Lucas Till as Alex Summers / Havok

  • Josh Helman as Colonel William Stryker

  • Ben Hardy as Angel

  • Lana Condor as Jubilee

  • Tómas Lemarquis as Caliban

  • Giant” Gustav Claude Ouimet as The Blob,

  • Monique Ganderton as one of En Sabah Nur’s original lieutenants, Death.

  • Hugh Jackman as Logan / Wolverine / Weapon X

• Music by John Ottman

• Cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel

• Edited by John Ottman, Michael Louis Hill

• Production companies: Marvel Entertainment, TSG Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Kinberg Genre, The Donners’ Company

• Distributed by 20th Century Fox

• Release date: May 9, 2016

• Running time: 144 minutes

• Country: United States

• Language: English

• Budget: $178 million

• Box office: $543.9 milion