Despite what Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe, Dark Phoenix is not the worst movie ever, nor the worst X-Men film (I would put The Last Stand and Apocalypse below this). However, that is not to say that this is a great film, or even a particularly good one.
It's hard to know where to begin with this movie, so I guess I'll start with the (few) positives. The action sequences in this (of which there aren't that many) are actually pretty entertaining. Maybe I was just happy to see some punches thrown after the dullness of the film's many conversational scenes, but the fights were easy to follow and creative. The movie utilises each mutant's individual powers much better than most, so we get to see the new renditions of Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Nightcrawler (Aussie Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Storm (Alexandra Shipp) integrated into the action much more and in more creative ways than in Apocalypse. As a byproduct of this, I found the final setpiece (taking place on a train) pretty engaging. It felt like the film had finally been given the shot of adrenaline it needed from the start. That scene was added in reshoots and I feel like it shows growth for Simon Kinberg as a director. He definitely has the potential to do great things in the action genre.
I think the biggest thing that stood out to me as bad in this film was the acting. There are two classes of thespians in this film: those who clearly don't want to be there and those who are giving it their best but don't have much to work with. The only person who rises above this is Michael Fassbender as Magneto, who is just as captivating here as he was in the previous three films. The rest don't fare as well. James McAvoy, who, in the interim between this instalment and the last, managed to give a career-best performance twice as another superpowered character, the Horde, in M. Night Shyamalan's Split and Glass, is definitely in the latter camp but his performance is severely harmed by his character spending most of the film being an unlikeable jackass and having lots of the worst lines. Tye Sheridan is an actor who I think has a lot of potential but he is given the unfortunate task of carrying a romance that we've never seen previously developed, and, like McAvoy, he gets some horrible lines. He does get the movie's obligatory X-Men f-bomb, so that's something, I guess. Turner doesn't fare very well, though it's a little harder to tell whether that was her fault or Kinberg's, Jennifer Lawrence looks like she's counting the seconds until her paycheck comes in, and Evan Peters is severely underused as Quicksilver. Jessica Chastain is usually pretty good but even she can't save the thankless cold villain character she's saddled with.
It's also clearly a movie directed by a first-time director. This can be seen in the aforementioned performances, but also in the cinematography. This is not a very interesting-looking film, and it is also pretty amateurish in some of it's camerawork and editing. Some of the shots aren't even fully in focus (some of those were stylistic choices, but some definitely weren't), and there are many odd cuts. There is also some awful foley work that a more experienced director would have shut down in a heartbeat. These sorts of things have no place in a blockbuster movie with this much money behind it, especially one that's been in production for years.
And my gripes with Kinberg aren't done yet. He also wrote the film, and the script is no good. It's entirely predictable, which might be down to the fact that the movie's been delayed so much that I've had plenty of time to think about it, but I'm still deducting points for it. The film really drags; for such a short movie, it feels a lot longer than it should. It never gains a sense of urgency or pace - it moves from one situation to the next in a fairly leisurely manner, using it's limited time to stage repetitive conversations that ultimately don't lead anywhere rather than developing the villains, or whoever the hell the main character is meant to be. Most of the character decisions, great and small, make no sense. For example, there's one scene which has a battle outside a house. Xavier is in a park on the other side of the road from the house, and needs to get to it. He calls Nightcrawler over and they teleport... to the curb on the same side of the road that they already were? I nearly yelled, 'WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST TELEPORT TO STRAIGHT IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE OR EVEN INSIDE YOU IDIOTS?!?' This is followed by an action scene where all the characters try to get across the road into the house when they could have just teleported there in the first place.
Unfortunately, between it's bad acting, amateur technical aspects and a script that is entirely devoid of logic, Dark Phoenix sends this franchise off on more of a whimper than a bang. It's not the worst this series has to offer but it's positioning as the final instalment makes it hurt that much more. There are some redeeming qualities such as the action sequences and Michael Fassbender's performance, but they do not keep the film afloat for me to recommend this to anybody who isn't already a fan of this franchise.
Score: ⭐⭐1/2
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