Since the dawn of civilization, he was worshiped as a god. Apocalypse, the first and most powerful mutant from Marvel's X-Men universe, amassed the powers of many other mutants, becoming immortal and invincible.

Synopsis Woken from a hibernation of thousands of years, multi-powered mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) is disillusioned with the world as he finds it. He recruits four powerful acolytes - including a vengeful Magneto (Michael Fassbender) - to conquer mankind and create a new world order.

With the fate of the planet in the balance, Professor X (James McAvoy) and the enigmatic Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) must lead a team of their most gifted followers to stop their greatest nemesis and save the world from complete destruction. There's a fairly consistent rule of thumb by which a comic-book movie can be judged: the fewer buildings that fall over, the better the film. The Dark Knight? Just the one building topples.

Captain America: Civil War? Some structural damage, but no actual demolitions. Man Of Steel and BvS? X-Men: Days of Future Past? Magneto moves a stadium, but at least it remains in one piece.

Which brings us to 1983. It's ten years on from the events of Days of Future Past and the X-Men are scattered around the globe. Mystique/Raven (Lawrence) is seeking out fellow mutants in Europe, Magneto (Fassbender) is trying to live a quiet life in Poland, and Professor Xavier (McAvoy) is nurturing the next generation of mutants at his school for the gifted. His latest class features a smattering of young, vaguely familiar faces, including Game Of Thrones' Sophie Turner as the young Jean Grey, along with her lover-to-be Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), who just turned up with a curious burning sensation in his eyes. But while they're dealing with their growing pains, a new threat has arisen in the form of Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), a mutant with a god complex who's spent the last 5,000 years in an Egyptian tomb.

When he's released in an astrophysical event witnessed by CIA snooper Moira McTaggart (Byrne), the glowering megalomaniac (specialist talent: embedding people in solid objects) sets about recruiting a quartet of super-mutants - the freshly aggravated Magneto, a young Storm, winged warrior Angel and Amazonian battlecat Psylocke - to help him destroy the world and rule what's left. Which really wouldn't be much. As the third entry in the most recent X-cycle, director Bryan Singer seems desperate to create a bigger spectacle than what's gone before. That a line of dialogue, somewhat bizarrely, references the movie's position as a trilogy-closer doesn't automatically raise it above the kind of criticism that befell the likes of The Dark Knight Rises. Like Christopher Nolan's third Batman outing, Apocalypse bites off way more than it can chew.

The scale overwhelms the characters, who are largely void of motivation or purpose (and in Lawrence's case, blue make-up, her A-list status apparently qualifying her for less time in the chair). A brief, plot-free sojourn to Alkali Lake to set up a cameo sums up the film's pacing issues while Apocalypse himself ambles around with no apparent urgency, patiently waiting for the CGI war to kick in. Meanwhile, with so many X-heroes - mostly very well played by a variety of familiar and new faces - vying for screen time, the core of the story lacks focus. Singer, usually so good at finding clever ways to deploy their ridiculously outlandish superpowers, pummels any plot subtleties - and, by the end, entire cities - into the ground. And that, as we've come to realise, is never a good thing.