X-Men: Dark Phoenix: Film Review

X-Men: Dark Phoenix: Film Review

Cast: Sophie Turner, James MacAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence, Tye Sheridan, Jodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, Jessica Chastain
Director: Simon Kinberg

Not every comic book movie works on the big screen.

Not every X-Men film has been a success, but over the past 20 years, the mutants have been ever present in a series of films that have had a level amount of hits and misses.

In Dark Phoenix, the series comes to an end with a franchise capper that misses all its major moments, and delivers a movie that offers some thrills, but barely enough to sustain it.

During a life-threatening rescue mission in space, Jean Grey (Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner) is hit by a cosmic force that transforms her into one of the most powerful mutants of all. 

Wrestling with this increasingly unstable power as well as her own personal demons, Jean spirals out of control, tearing the X-Men family apart and threatening to destroy the very fabric of our planet.

In all honesty, elements of Captain Marvel's all powerful deus ex machina and how to suppress it come to the fore again, and while moments early on hint at Charles Xavier's morality falling apart in a MeToo kind of nod, the film's only interested in rushing headlong to its conclusion via way of an admittedly excellent train-set final showdown.

But it's in the emotional beats where X- Men: Dark Phoenix falls apart.

A major death doesn't land like it should, and the elements of conflict feel forced rather than natural. It's the emotional detachment that harms the film the most, and while a majority of it is a film we've seen before, the latest incarnation of Dark Phoenix does little to take wings and soar as it should.

Elements of a MeToo control issue aside ("She's not your little girl anymore," one character intones at one point), the film has little to say except to try and transpose comic book panels to the big screen. By opening it up to a wider world midway through, the film loses any hope of intimacy as it looks to tick some character beats and fan hopes.

Chastain, in her audition for an emotion-free Terminator, is saddled with little as the baddie of the piece, and barely hits any of the necessary strides before the script goes down the gurgler. Turner sells some of the conflict of the anger and resentment bubbling up, but in truth, little is required of her other than to look tortured in her close ups. The tragedy doesn't land as it should, and it's fatal at times. MacAvoy and Fassbender impress as ever, and Hoult manages competently with stronger material.

On the visual side, the FX are superbly executed, with early scenes within space brimming with visual flair and excellence; and in the final showdown on a train (before it descends into the usual rote CGI tedium), the film finds a life that's been lacking beforehand.

Ultimately, X-Men: Dark Phoenix is an asinine blockbuster, one that fails in its MO as a franchise finale, and one that shows there was frustrating potential, if it had dared to do something different. As it stands, it's more an X marks the spot where something could have risen from the ashes of a consistently uneven series.