Review: Dark Phoenix
Dark Phoenix, directed by Simon Kinberg, tells the tale of the X-Men, led by Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) as they do some superhero work to make the world a better place. But when a mysterious source of energy ingrains itself onto fellow X-Men Jean Gray (Sophie Turner), she starts to manifest into something quite powerful and uncontrollable. It’s up to the rest of the X-Men to save Jean from this dark power as well as from aliens (yes, ALIENS) that plan on using this “Phoenix Force” for their own ill-purposes.
Now I’ve been a fan of the X-Men growing up. Of all the Marvel heroes the X-Men were among my favorites. This is now the tenth installment of Fox’s X-Men franchise (not counting the Deadpool movies and the upcoming New Mutants whenever that comes out), and it’s set to be the final one to conclude the series (at least until Marvel Studios decide to reboot the franchise). And just as you’d expect it’s not exactly good; in fact it’s pretty dang terrible. Dark Phoenix was a complete train wreck of epic proportions; it fails on almost every conceivable level…and oddly enough that’s exactly why I actually recommend this trash fire of a film.
Everything that you can imagine going wrong in this film happens. The writing is god awful, the story is pointless and meandering, the characters are shockingly dull (I mean c’mon they’re the freaking X-Men how can you NOT make them interesting!?), the performances were pathetically bad, the climax was uninspired and bland, the makeup especially on Jennifer Lawrence screams of laziness, outside of the X-Men doing cool X-Men stuff every now and then everything about this film was an epic fail.
But that’s exactly why I had a blast. This film was so laughably bad that you can’t help but enjoy every minute of it if you don’t take ANY of it seriously. This is one of those “so-bad-it’s-good” kind of movies that everyone needs to see especially if you enjoy watching those kinds of movies. It’s honestly amazing how someone can fail this much at making a movie and make the EXACT SAME MISTAKES that The Last Stand made when tackling the same story line. You’d think that the filmmakers would learn their lesson by now after screwing up the Dark Phoenix story line the first time.
Overall this was a bad movie, but it was also a fun bad movie. If you find enjoyment in watching bad movies ironically then by all means check this film out; you’re going to have a B L A S T. Otherwise if you want to watch something that’s actually good then stay as far away from this film as possible. This was a incredibly bad end to a long standing franchise. Let’s hope that Marvel Studios can bring the X-Men back to their former glory soon.
Final Verdict: 3/10