Avis des critiques

At its strongest moments, the movie jabs the marrow of the mind, plays with the very impulses and boundaries underlying ordinary cinematic perception and response in ways that few more substantial dramatic movies ever do. Yet, except for those intermittent but mightily elaborate sequences, the movie is unsatisfying, a dramatic drag and a visual slog.

Though the action scenes are cut-rate, the lack of emotional purpose—and the premonition that everything will be alright in the end—renders them weightless. When Hugh Jackman stops by, Singer seems to have all but given up, dutifully assembling a collage of everything he thinks people should want in an X-Men movie, but not what they truly need.

Compared to the sleek and often thrilling X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the movie seems dull and bloated. The highlights belong to the teens, notably Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), tapping into her sensitivity to save the world, and Quicksilver (Evan Peters), plucking children from an incoming explosion to the sounds of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams."

Because Mr. Singer has the technical chops to be a near-distinctive filmmaker (remember "The Usual Suspects"?), his X-Men movies have always delivered what could be called a higher class of superhero entertainment... [But] for every lively moment, there's a reminder that the franchise is tiring. The genre's emphasis on potential mass death is obsessive and unimaginative.

Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.

It isn't a film for deep messages. It's a film for those who'll thrill to see the ‘X' in the opening 20th Century Fox logo remain for a fraction of a second after the rest of it has faded, and who'll sit through the closing titles in the hope of a post-credits teaser. It's a film for fans, in a franchise that's deflated gently but may well run indefinitely – and the only question now must be, how long before the X-Men get to fight The Avengers in a cross-breeding, franchise-coupling showdown?

What makes X-Men: Apocalypse so exciting isn't really any one thing but rather its cohesion, its storytelling verve. Where other recent superhero films have struggled to jam-pack their unwieldy plots with characters and incident and meaning, this film nimbly mixes narrative exuberance and emotional depth, flamboyant displays of power with quietly terrifying exchanges. It zips along, combining the highs and lows of a real comic book with gloriously cinematic storytelling.

The issue with Apocalypse isn't, as it turns out, that the franchise left itself with too little to work with after the tidy ending of the previous film, but that Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.