X-Men: Apocalypse

Skippable, and the film contains the review. A character walks out of a cinema in 1983 having just watched Return of the Jedi and says out loud that the third one is always the worst, which was a joke about The Last Stand and landed instead on the film making it.

The problems are scale and motive. The prequels had worked by being decade pieces with specific political settings; this one has an immortal from ancient Egypt who wakes up, recruits four followers in about twenty minutes, and intends to destroy civilisation for reasons the film never articulates beyond displeasure. Oscar Isaac is buried in prosthetics, pitch-shifted and immobile, and the performance cannot reach the screen.

The 1980s setting is a costume rather than a subject. Three significant characters are recast as teenagers and given introductions that repeat work the original films had already done, and Charles and Erik are moved back to positions they had already moved past.

Two things survive. The second Quicksilver sequence, rescuing a mansion full of people from an explosion, is better than the first. And Fassbender gets one superb stretch in a Polish forest, playing a man who had built a quiet life and loses it, which belongs in a better film. At a hundred and forty-four minutes it is the longest here.