Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 48% (Critics) / 74% (Audience)
Directed By: Bryan Singer
Written By: Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Oscar Isaac
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Synopsis: With the emergence of the world’s first mutant, Apocalypse, the X-Men must unite to defeat his extinction level plan. – (Source)

The Good:
Once again the most fun part of an X-Men movie is Quicksilver played by Evan Peters. As great as his big action scene was in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, his role in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE was even better. From the moment he showed up Peters stole the show and including him in a bigger role on the team was a smart move on the part of director Bryan Singer.
I also found myself really enjoying the teenage X-Men and would have loved to have spent more time focusing on the younger set learning how to use their abilities and work together as a cohesive unit.

The Bad:
This movie is a bit of a mess in how it moves the story along. Its like all scenes in this movie are just there to hurry the movie along to the big final showdown against Apocalypse and no time is allowed for anything to breath or for characters to be fleshed out.
Also Singer has a bad habit of including X-Men characters in his movies that are only those characters in name only. I am not one of those folks who needs adaptations to be exactly like the comic book version but it would be nice if they even had the same power-set as their comic book version or a similar personality.
Also Jennifer Lawrence’s appearing to be bored to death in every scene she was in was something I expected but I was shocked that Michael Fassbender was seemingly as bored with the proceedings as Lawrence was.
And the awkward, ham-fisted inclusion of Wolverine was such an obvious bit of desperation.

The Ugly:
I like Oscar Isaac and he has been pretty much amazing in everything he stars in but he was just not good in this film. I don’t know whether it was the fact he was playing a character that was not very well written or if it was because of the crappy make-up he had to wear but his Apocalypse really did not work for me. His motivation was uninspired, his powers were pretty much a catch all for whatever the script needed him to do at any given time and for being a major X-Men baddie he came off as really small and unimpressive.
Also the casual way the movie glossed over Prof. X’s repeated mind-raping of Moira McTaggart was kinda skeevy.

Final Verdict: A messy story and a pretty lame villain results in an uninspired film that seemingly falls prey to the dreaded third movie jinx. There were some bright spots like Quicksilver and I think a film that focused on the exploits of the teenage X-Men would be a pretty good idea. An even better one would be to allow someone besides Bryan Singer to helm the next X-Men movie because Singer seems to not really have much interesting to say about these characters anymore.

Grade: C