REVIEW: X-Men: Apocalypse (12A) **

Simon Kinberg’s messy script bursts at the seams with tortured characters and subplots, bloating the running time to close to two-and-a-half hours.

It’s a physical ordeal for us, but too little time for X-Men: Apocalypse to do justice to a menagerie of gifted misfits on both sides of a conflict that reduces capital cities to rubble.

There is dramatic fat to be trimmed: an interlude involving a face from the past – codenamed Weapon X – is superfluous and the final showdown is played out simultaneously in the real world and inside the connected minds of telepaths.

The arch-villain slaughters a factory of workmen with a swipe of his hand and could destroy mankind without breaking a sweat. Instead, he chooses to waste precious time recruiting less powerful mutants to do his bidding and consequently undermines his nefarious plan to wipe clean the evolutionary slate.

Ten years have passed since the events of X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which saw Logan (Hugh Jackman) travel back in time to 1973 to make contact with the young Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and neutralise the Sentinel program of killer robots.

It’s now the early 1980s and the very first mutant, En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), reawakens after thousands of years of inactivity.

He is disgusted by the pitiful state of mankind and resolves to create a new world order with the help of his four devoted horsemen of the apocalypse: Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Olivia Munn), Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and Magneto.

Professor X and Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) vow to protect mankind and assemble a team of young X-Men including Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Havok (Lucas Till) and his younger brother Cyclops (Tye Sheridan).

X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t settle long enough on one narrative thread to generate dramatic momentum or suspense.

Turner and Sheridan make the biggest impact, capturing the turmoil of teenagers unable to control their unique and devastating powers.

Special effects have improved in leaps since Singer’s first foray into this universe. He blitzes the screen with eye-popping digital trickery, guaranteeing a relentless assault on the eyes – especially in 3D – which is just as likely to induce a headache as awe and wonder.