Dark Phoenix (Film Review)

2019 20th Century Fox
Written and Directed by: Simon Kinberg
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, and Jessica Chastain
MPAA Rating: PG-13; Running Time: 114 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 4/10

20th Century Fox's 2000 release, X-Men, changed cinema forever. By that point, superhero films were a joke--Joel Schumacher and Cannon Films had made damn sure of it. Sure, the decent Blade came along in the late 90's, but it came across as more of an exciting horror-action vehicle for Wesley Snipes than a comic adaptation.
Say what you will about Bryan Singer's personal life--and holy cow, can you say a lot--but the guy is responsible for the entire 21st century superhero boom. 2000's X-Men touched on timeless themes of alienation and discrimination, created a fully-realized world, presented an immediate icon with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and featured beautiful, balletic fight scenes, showcasing excellent wire choreography and dynamic camera movements...and all in 104 minutes on a 75-million dollar budget.That like, half the minutes and budgets of the previous sentence.
Suddenly, superheroes were cool again.
I watched X-Men over and over again, connecting with its themes, loving its action and characters, and feeling nostalgic about the trading cards, comics, and animated series of my youth. Somehow, 2003's followup, X2, was miles better than the original, amplifying everything that was good about X-Men, introducing even cooler characters, and raising the series to a new, epic level. How were these wonders possible? Would there be great X-Men films for years to come? 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand answered, "No. There will not. There most definitely will not."
The Last Stand remains the most disappointing filmgoing experience of my nearly 40-years of life. At least The Phantom Menace has great action scenes and an incredible John Williams score. Written by Simon Kinberg, whose previous two writing credits beforehand included the sequel to XXX and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and directed by Brett Ratner, The Last Stand, outside of one short, brutal moment involving Wolverine and knives, has nothing. Two years later, Iron Man was released, and the Marvel universe, sans the X-Men, blasted into the stratosphere. The X-Men were then left to wander the cinematic universe.

Quicksilver is bummed.

With enthusiasm for the series now greatly dimmed, 2009 brought the supremely disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine--an amalgam of 00's popular cinema's most negative traits. That film should have been a sure thing, an easy slam dunk. In the aftermath, word kept going round of a possible X-Men Origins: Magneto or X-Men Origins: Storm, but with the X-Men name now severely tarnished, no such films materialized. In 2011, the studio attempted a soft reboot, with the decent, retro-set X-Men: First Class, then did something a bit different with their most iconic character in 2013's also decent The Wolverine. Meanwhile, The Last Stand screenwriter, Simon Kinberg, partook upon his own his own journey, spewing out more cinematic crap, with writing credits including Jumper, Abraham Linclon: Vampire Hunter, and Fantastic Four...yes, that Fantastic Four. You might wonder why someone who was consistently producing sub-par work was consistently awarded more work, instead of that work going to someone else--maybe even to a woman or a person-of-color--but I guess you can just keep wondering. In fact, Kinberg was named one of the most powerful people in Hollywood in 2016, as well as one of the highest banking producers and writers in town. How the hell does that work?
Now, after a shockingly decent foray back into the X-Men world with 2014's Days of Future Past, and a not as decent return in 2016's Apocalypse, Kinberg has been given the keys to the kingdom. He's not only been allowed to write and direct the latest X-Men film--he's been allowed a redo at the "Dark Phoenix" X-Men storyline he bungled in X-Men: The Last Stand 13 years ago. Just in case you were foggy on this fact, there are 7.5 billion people on the planet. Apparently, Simon Kinberg is the only one of them who is capable of writing and directing an X-Men film. And not just any X-Men film...Kinberg has already done The Last Stand...now here is the X-Men movie.
It seems, Disney has been kicking so much butt with their Marvel movies, they made major enough coin to buy 20th Century Fox. I guess actually enacting quality control and having a clear vision for your film series brings success. Who knew? Now, Disney owns the rights to the X-Men. And with Dark Phoenix, 20th Century Fox's 19-year run of X-Men films comes to a close.

Why does the end have to be so veiny?

With all of the negative early reviews posted for Dark Phoenix, along with my strong dislike for most of Kinberg's previous work, I decided to avoid the film. Then, three factors converged: I realized that I have seen every X-Men film in the theater, Father's Day weekend, and I am a classic contrarian and wanted to go see Dark Phoenix, then shout from the rooftops that in this case, the critics are wrong. Whelp, I saw Dark Phoenix for Father's Day, and that last bit from the previous sentence...that's not going to happen. Dark Phoenix is terrible.
The film starts off well enough, with an X-Men Origins: Jean Grey edition, only it's about six minutes long--this intro reveals how young Jean's telekinetic powers came at the worst possible time, during a car ride with her parents that ends in violent disaster. Jean's taken in by the benevolent Dr. Charles Xavier, and allowed to grow up at his school for mutants...mutants just like Jean.
Flash forward 17-years, and Jean is taking part in an astronaut rescue mission with her fellow mutants, mutants now deemed the "X-Men." Immediately, the "this is a bad movie" bells start ringing.
The pacing is too fast and clumsy. The dialogue feels canned and not human. The score sounds like it was done by a Youtube inspirational movie trailer company, and it never stops accompanying any scene, no matter what is happening.
By the time the X-Men get to space,  I am really trying to still like the movie. The astronauts are saved, but Jean gets blasted by some strange energy cloud. One of the X-Men, Raven, feels like Xavier needlessly risked his students lives. Raven is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who has won an Oscar for best performance, but Lawrence will have you wondering here if this is her first movie, and if maybe she should be looking for a new profession. The character Raven, aka "Mystique," is a blue-tinted shapeshifter, and was played magnificently by supermodel, Rebecca Romijn, in the earlier 00's X-Men movies. Romijn brought immense personality to the role by nearly using only physicality alone. Here, the Oscar-winning Lawrence rarely takes Mystique's true physical form, mainly just appearing as Jennifer Lawrence. When she does appear in her true form, hoo boy does the makeup look lousy. Not as lousy as the dialogue Lawrence is given, though. There's a scene between her and Xavier in Xavier's office which features the worst dialogue in the entire 20th Century Fox X-Men's history, and Lawrence's Ricki Lake-guest quality acting does it no favors. Also, Mystique is inexplicably "one of the good guys" here, which not only goes against character, but is really, really dumb.

Yeah, I'm talking about you.

At this point in the film, I noticed my wife and son kind of sucking in their lips. Yeah, I can't pick a verb tense for the experience. Sorry. Bare with me. Bear with me? Anyway...
It's Father's Day, and daddy wanted to see this movie, right? Better try to be polite. Well, before you can say "bathroom break," Jean's feeling weird and acting weirder, suddenly experiencing power that is only less extreme than how emo it makes her. Jean runs away, the X-Men catch up, and then the resulting scene is so goofy...my wife and son couldn't keep their laughter in any more...and neither could I.
The next 90 minutes of the film takes any positive character attribute the previous films defined, and ruins or subverts them in the dumbest way possible, amidst lousy pacing, direction, and dialogue. Some aliens find Jean and try to get her to act even more powerful and even more emo. Everything happens so fast, it doesn't make any logical sense. Two or three movies-worth of plot happens in 20 minutes.
Some of the X-Men decide to try to save Jean from herself. Some of them decide to try to destroy her, or something, I don't know. At one point, Cyclops, who is not only the Captain America of the X-Men franchise, but also one of the most dorky, goody-two shoes comic book characters ever conceived, tells one attacking character, "If you touch Jean, I will fucking kill you." At this ridiculous show of put-on machismo, my nine-year old son nearly had a heart attack, laughing for a full minute, his laughter infecting my wife and I so heartily that we will remember the joy it brought us for the rest of our days. He brought it up seven times on the walk back to the car and the drive home, also noting amid our renewed laughter that the character of Cyclops, as my son--again, a nine year old-- understands him, would never, ever, ever say that. If a nine year old gets it, why can't multi-millionaire screenwriter Simon Kinberg, who is considerably older than nine?
Poor Sophie Turner is asked the impossible task of portraying the fraying Jean. My wife couldn't help but continually point out Jean's lousy JC Penny's jacket (the film is supposed to take place in 1992, but anachronistically contains a scene where one X-Men whose power is, I guess, pop performing, sings a late 10's dance song) and bad makeup and hairstyle, to which I could only respond, I guess Disney fired all the makeup and wardrobe people before the movie was finished. Turner isn't a natural fit for this transformation as it is, but with little logic behind anything her character does, and with horrible dialogue to spout about how her new powers are evil but feel good, even Meryl Streep would struggle through this role.
The shame of it is, there's a 20-minute stretch late in Dark Phoenix that works. When the two disagreeing factions of mutants face off, it's a bitter reminder of just how cool it is to see these mutants using their individual powers against each other, and in tandem. Then the mutants team up to fight a greater foe in an even cooler sequence on a train. Again, it's only 20 decent minutes out of 114, and these almost act only to infuriate, by reminding what this whole series could and should have been over the last decade.
A couple months ago, Disney Marvel triumphantly capped off their last 11 years of films, with Avengers: Endgame. Late in that film, when a broken Captain America holds his head up and defiantly says, instead of, "If you touch these Infinity Stones, I'll fucking kill you," "Avengers...assemble," the moment is full of incredible emotional power. That moment would not be possible without 2000's X-Men. Dark Phoenix, the capper to the X-Men films, contains no such power. These X-Men films already found a natural stopping point in 2017's incredible, unlikely Logan. Logan, which somehow found someone besides Simon Kinberg writing it (perhaps not unrelated to this fact, the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar), ends the iconic Hugh Jackman Wolverine's storyline magnificently. Logan also explores the X-Men's failures in a sense that can easily be taken as a metaphor for the film series. The sense of closure in Logan is incredible and definite.

Now that's a damn ending.

So...Dark Phoenix has already been done...in just as incompetent a fashion, 13 years ago. The 20th Century Fox X-Men series already reached a fitting conclusion two years ago. Disney bought 20th Century Fox's film department. Dark Phoenix has no reason to exist...and it seems to exist only to prove that. When X-Men does have a reason to cinematically exist again, when Disney/Marvel gets a handle on what they want to do with it, I know a name to maybe cross off in the creative rolodex. Unless, we're playing by baseball rules, I guess...and only Dark Phoenix adaptations count...