When Dani Moonstar’s (Blu Hunt) family are killed by a tornado she finds herself at a special facility for new mutants who do not quite have control of their latent powers. The fellow patients in the facility with her are Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton) and Roberto Da Costa (Henry Zaga). Or Wolfsbane, Magik, Cannonball and Sunspot to comic readers, not that you will hear them called that in this film. Overseeing their treatment is Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).

The New Mutants is a peculiar film both because of its journey to the big screen and the content within it. Writer/Director Josh Boone is perhaps most famous for drama and love stories with his most recognisable film being 2014’s The Fault in Our Stars. But for this X-Men instalment he wanted to make a horror film, or as much of a horror film as a franchise feature would allow.

The final picture feels a little bit of a hybrid of both which is perhaps a polite way of saying that it feels unsure of what it wants to be. There are elements of horror here, but nothing that would interest a true horror fan aside from perhaps the design of Rasputin’s worst nightmares. Frustratingly, the main thrust towards a horror film seems to be an incredibly dark image for the majority of the movie. There are elements of a love story here, but it is fairly fleeting and not entirely earned. There are also elements of a superhero film here, in the main with its big CGI finale. But despite all of these aspects, the film it most reminded me of was Glass, as it features superheroes in a medical facility discussIng their issues. Although I suspect M. Night Shyamalan would be dreaming of the budget Boone had for his final scenes. Although, bizarrely for a film that has good effects in its finale, they are dire in its opening set piece.

It is hard to know whether the films development hell had anything to do with this mixture of ideas. Originally filmed in 2017 it was planned for release in April 2018 before X-Men: Dark Phoenix was to appear in cinemas. However 20th Century Fox asked the director to reshoot a large percentage of the film delaying its release. Before those reshoots could happen Disney bought 20th Century Fox and asked the director to continue to edit the film from his original footage with the film planned to arrive in April 2020. With the Coronavirus pandemic pushing the film back again to now. The New Mutants is now a 20th Century Studios film (Disney’s renaming of the Fox brand) and finally here.

None of the requested reshoots apparently took place and the director has said he only had to jettison ideas that linked it to the larger X-Men franchise partly to do with the poor performance of other films and partly because they knew it would never be continued on under Disney’s ownership. But it is hard to believe the lack of focus in the film was what was originally conceived.

It is also worth pointing out that the original creator of The New Mutants has been vocal recently in his upset at some of the films choices. His main grievances being the change of the appearance of some of his characters and the fact that they spelt his name incorrectly in the credits. A pretty poor show given they had the last three years to get that part correct!

Running at a brief 94 minutes The New Mutants is functional. It does not have any outstanding performances or moments. And yet it is intriguing just because it is an oddity. The fact that the best moment in the entire film is a line from The Wizard of Oz perhaps sums it up best.