X-Men: Dark Phoenix review – a tedious end to a muddled series

It’s been just over a month since Avengers: Endgame rewarded longtime MCU fans with a thrilling and emotionally satisfying conclusion to its 22-film story arc. Now the X-Men franchise returns with its own finale, Dark Phoenix, the twelfth entry in a two decade-old series that has soared and flailed in equal measure. Limp with fatigue, though, this is a different kind of end game offering very few of the same pleasures. Essentially a whimper at feature length, it’s a film made from other, better comic book movies, serving only to cement this franchise’s legacy as a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched parts.

It’s no secret the X-Men series has always felt compromised by the studio’s lax approach to continuity. Trying to get your head around the increasingly mind-bending plots has never been easy, to the point where most fans simply stopped trying. Dark Phoenix is different in that it sets out to tell a relatively simple story (yay!), though this time it goes too far in the other direction (nay!): there’s barely any plot at all, resulting in a film that’s both dull and creatively bankrupt. Double whammy.

Things start out promisingly enough, with our superhero team (Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult, among others) jetting into space on a NASA rescue mission in what turns out to be the film’s best sequence. It’s here that Turner’s psychic mutant Jean Grey is exposed to a mysterious “Solar Flare,” imbuing her with a great but destructive power that also causes her to revisit her past and play temporary villain. When Jean sets out to find Magneto (Michael Fassbender), it’s up to the other X-Men to track her down.

Thrust into the limelight, Turner improves upon her performance in X-Men: Apocalypse, but her role remains grossly unwritten. We’re repeatedly told Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is to blame for Jean’s turn to the dark side and there are scenes where these accusations threaten to become interesting. But they’re never fleshed out and we never get a true sense of what makes Jean tick. Like the other mutants, she’s a victim of a script that fails to justify its own existence. It doesn’t help that the film has no true lead, either (the movie flirts with making Jennifer Lawrence lead, who looks totally bored), or that we already know how things will resolve because, hey, Bryan Singer’s X-Men.

If there’s an overall sense of actors simply fulfilling contractual obligations, the laziness also extends to writer-director Simon Kinberg, who’s been involved as a writer since The Last Stand but seems incapable of conjuring up any enthusiasm here. His script is riddled with been there, done that moments, whilst it’s entirely possible to predict almost every other line of dialogue (I turned this into a little game to pass the time). With so many scenes that loop round on themselves, repeating information, it’s the final set-piece, aboard a moving train, that briefly rescues Dark Phoenix from lethargy and prevents it from becoming a total (ahem) trainwreck. But with so little at stake, and a big bad that fails to inspire any fear (Jessica Chastain, wasted, is the very definition of a one-note villain), it’s hard to feel invested.

This isn’t the worst X-Men film. That prize goes to The Last Stand or Apocalypse, depending on your tolerance for Vinnie Jones. Still, lacking the wit and humour of your average MCU entry, it’s obvious Dark Phoenix is a last ditch attempt to make money before the rights shift to Disney. The ending scene, which aims to recapture some of that old Professor X/Magneto magic, is almost laughable in its fecklessness, a sad reminder of how far we’ve fallen. Had Kinberg taken a few risks and failed in the process, we could have had least written off his attempts as admirable. Instead Dark Phoenix feels like it does everything in its power to avoid catching fire.

★★☆☆☆

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