X-Men: Dark Phoenix Review: Bland Boring Bad
Before the release of Dark Phoenix, an executive at Fox studios described it as "the perfect send-off" to the franchise and after watching the movie the irony of that statement does not escape me
The X-men franchise under Fox studios has always been a mixed bag, from genre redefining to complete garbage the next and so you would think that the studio would give it a proper send off before it merges with the MCU , unfortunately, that is not the case here.
The Dark Phoenix saga is one of the most celebrated storylines of the X-Men comic books, one which Fox tried to adapt into a movie before with the terrible X-Men: The Last Stand so when they announced they would be doing it again fans were skeptical and rightfully so
The plot of the movie only follows the basic outline of the comic with Jean Gray played by Sophie Turner becomes the vessel of a powerful entity known as the Phoenix during a mission and loses control of her powers and goes berserk how the remaining X-men stop her is the crux of the movie also there is an evil alien race who want to use the power of the Phoneix for generic movie bad guy reasons.
This movie has gone through a lot of reshoots and it shows there are scenes with good CGI and scenes where you can really feel they rushed the CGI so they can meet a deadline, the editing is also choppy and visually nothing in the movie stands out
Sophie Turner tries her best to carry this movie but fails her performance was ok but at times it feels hammy, the rest of the cast is wasted James Mcavoy, Micheal Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence are clearly only there because of their contracts. The writers clearly don't care because the movie reused character arcs from the previous movies and even makes a joke about it, Jessica Chasten who plays the villain has clearly no investment in the movie which is made clear by her performance and she can't be blamed.
The biggest issue I have with the movie is just how tired and boring it felt, this could have been a great sendoff to a franchise that is nearly two decades old but instead it goes out with a whimper.
