8) Too Many Characters, Not Enough Development
It’s not entirely the fault of McAvoy, Lawrence et al that they’re not at their best in Apocalypse. In fairness to them, they’ve been lumbered with the least-interesting versions of their characters yet. Much of the blame lies with Simon Kinberg’s script, which packs in an enormous amount of characters and leaves little breathing room for any of them to develop.
Singer and Kinberg cheekily mock Brett Ratner’s unloved X-Men: The Last Stand in Apocalypse (“the third [film]’s always the worst”), but their latest effort ironically shares one of X3‘s main flaws: there are just too many people at the party, and Singer and Kinberg have a hard time juggling that many characters at once. If you thought Days of Future Past was busy with characters, Apocalypse is positively bursting with them.