The New Mutants Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs

5. Josh Boone's Mediocre Direction

As much as Josh Boone received wide acclaim for his work helming The Fault in Our Stars, he appears to be the latest instance of a low-budget filmmaker being chewed up and spat out by the blockbuster movie machine.

Now in fairness, we'll sadly never know exactly what Boone's final vision of The New Mutants would've been, but from this iteration it's tough to believe that any number of reshoots would've turned things around entirely.

Disappointingly, Boone's direction is for the most part totally nothing, making the film's aesthetic resemble that of a cheap streaming service pilot rather than a blockbuster with a budget in the range of $70-80 million.

The shot selections are dull, the aforementioned horror scenes lack the necessary verve, and even the most basic dialogue scenes aren't filmed with much cinematic flair at all.

It smacks of a director so thoroughly out of their depth, or at least being constrained by the nature of big-budget studio filmmaking.