X-Men: Apocalypse is a mess. That can be ok sometimes, because some of the best movies of all time are a little messy, and even some of the biggest messes are captivating or interesting in spite of their flaws. But Apocalypse is just a mess with nothing to redeem it. The previous main film in the X-Men series (now 9 movies, depending on how you count), Days of Future Past, was also a mess, but that was partly by design. It went out of its way in an attempt to have it all, combining the original cast with the First Class reboot cast in one extravaganza, with the saga’s most popular character, Wolverine, at the center, and the result had its moments seemingly in spite of itself. This follow-up doesn’t attempt anything nearly as bold or ambitious, yet it fails to deliver on nearly every front. It’s flash and spectacle filled with no substance, yet even the flash and spectacle are generally uninteresting. It tells a story that isn’t worth telling that tries to pander both to comic-book geeks and to simple fans of the movies, yet none of those moments have any impact. It’s filled with actors who often very clearly would rather be in any other movie than this one. It tries to give us something new while retreading some of the same plotlines we’ve already seen in the last 16 years of X-Men movies, but disregards what made the X-Men so special in the first place, all while ignoring any of the basic logic or continuity required for mutli-film sagas in general or the history of this franchise in particular. X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t necessarily aggressively or offensively bad, it’s just generally pointless, and, with the exception of two scenes, utterly forgettable.

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