X-Men: Dark Phoenix Review Roundup

Nearly two decades after the franchise began, the X-Men series of films is coming to an end with X-Men: Dark Phoenix. While the series has never set new standards for either critical and financial reception to superhero movies, the films helped ignite interest in comic book characters who weren’t as recognizable as Batman or Superman. When including the series’ many spinoffs and sequels, Rotten Tomatoes calculated “Rotten” scores for four films in the series and, with reviews for Dark Phoenix finally unveiled, its initial score likely solidifies its place as the fifth Rotten entry in the franchise, with critics finding a number of elements falling flat.

In Dark Phoenix, the X-Men face their most formidable and powerful foe: one of their own, Jean Grey. During a rescue mission in space, Jean is nearly killed when she is hit by a mysterious cosmic force. Once she returns home, this force not only makes her infinitely more powerful, but far more unstable. Wrestling with this entity inside her, Jean unleashes her powers in ways she can neither comprehend nor contain. With Jean spiraling out of control, and hurting the ones she loves most, she begins to unravel the very fabric that holds the X-Men together. Now, with this family falling apart, they must find a way to unite – not only to save Jean’s soul, but to save our very planet from aliens who wish to weaponize this force and rule the galaxy.

While the reviews for the film don’t necessarily agree on one prevailing failure in the film, the overall theme of the reviews is that the film is largely forgettable and, for the successes the series has already enjoyed, those shortcomings are amplified due to this being the final chapter in the series.

Scroll down to see what critics are saying about X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

Brandon Davis – ComicBook.com

“In the end, Dark Phoenix is not the conclusion fans of the X-Men franchise might have been hoping for and it doesn’t make much of an effort to tie every narrative thread into a nice bow as the franchise is probably coming to an end here. It’s a bit behind its time. Still, the movie is fun and safe movie for fans of the characters to watch in a theater with a bass-heavy sound system, and leaves the key characters well enough to remember them fondly.”

You can read the full review here.

Brian Lowry – CNN.com

“[Director] Simon Kinberg has worked on scripts for three previous X-Men films, and with his promotion here to writer and director, approaches the material with considerable conviction, as well as plenty of callbacks to the earlier movies. What he can’t do, at least consistently, is make this story pop, or prevent the inevitable showdown — with multiple parties engaged in a massive battle — fully engaging, as opposed to devolving into a sort-of chaotic mess.”

You can read the full review here.

Scott Mendelson – Forbes

“That this installment mostly takes place in 1992 is ironic considering that’s when the Fox animated show (which was a gateway drug for many a future comic or X-Men nerd) premiered. Just the first season of that show offered many plots, characters, locations and villains that the movies never got around to because they were too busy playing the ‘Magneto has a point, but Charles is in the right’ card again and again. Even this sequel becomes more about Charles, Raven, Beast, and Magneto at the expense of Jean, Cyclops, Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Dark Phoenix isn’t a miserable motion picture, but it’s an underwhelming and fitting finale for a once-groundbreaking series. It refused to evolve, so now it dies.”

You can read the full review here.

Owen Gleiberman – Variety

“The light-show effects have a mid-’90s fanciful cheesiness, and I dug them for that reason. There’s also a visual motif that works terrifically well: When the characters get beamed somewhere, they’re teleported in a split-second whoosh, vaporized into smoky clouds of Crayola granules. Yet Kinberg also knows how to put the metal onscreen. A climactic set piece is set aboard a speeding train, where Magneto and the other X-Men are traveling under guard, and Kinberg stages this sequence with a hellbent majesty that feels like something out of Snowpiercer. [Michael] Fassbender knows how to emote in tandem with the effects — he mind-crumples a train, and you feel every finger of force — and when dozens of machine guns are hovering in the air, blasting away at [Jessica] Chastain, and the bullets dent her but leave her unharmed, the movie achieves a deranged flamboyance.”

You can read the full review here.

Michael Phillips – Chicago Tribune

“The lesser X-Men movies, and there have been many, have a way of dragging its best players down to a lower level of skill. If you went into Dark Phoenix cold, without seeing any previous installments up through X-Men: Apocalypse, you’d wonder if Jennifer Lawrence or Nicholas Hoult or Michael Fassbender or James McAvoy are any good, really. It’s odd how much more of a smug bastard Xavier is, as played by McAvoy, than in Patrick Stewart’s portrayal in earlier X-Men chapters.”

You can read the full review here.

Brian Truitt – USA Today

“The movie feels small for something with such humongous, universe-shattering stakes – and not in a good way. Jean becomes a galactic-level antagonist capable of changing life itself, not unlike that other comic-book dude Thanos. He snagged two space-sprawling, blockbuster Avengers movies; by comparison, one of the major Dark Phoenix action sequences takes place on a train. On Earth. The first couple of X-Men movies in the 2000s, and more recently X-Men: First Class and Logan, set the standard for what this long-running franchise could and should do. Compared to that ilk, Dark Phoenix simply flames out.”

You can read the full review here.

Matt Singer – ScreenCrush

“It’s very hard to tell this story in a satisfying way in this little amount of time. Multiple characters undergo life-altering changes of perspective — flipping from good to evil, sympathetic to monstrous — in a matter of seconds. The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we’ve hardly seen. The film is like an adaptation of the original Dark Phoenix comics, and also of the Anchorman ‘Well, that escalated quickly’ meme. Everything happens too fast, until the whole structure goes down in flames.”

You can read the full review here.

A.A. Dowd – AV Club

“There’s just little here that the X-Men series hasn’t shown audiences before. On top of that, it finds no real replacement for the shopworn franchise pleasures it doesn’t provide; we get no substitution for Hugh Jackman’s out-of-commission Wolverine, for the cheap prequel thrill of seeing younger versions of old characters, for a moment as sublime as the ‘Time In A Bottle’ sequence from Days Of Future Past. It’s possible, of course, that there was a better Dark Phoenix once; the finished film, finally opening after delays probably associated with the Fox merger, bears the clear mark of post-production rejiggering. Certainly, this series, uneven and repetitive though it could be, deserved a stronger sendoff before the inevitable MCU reboot. But maybe it got that in Logan, whose final image is more powerful—and conclusive—than anything this skimpy, quasi-farewell can muster. Now there was a different kind of X-Men movie.”

You can read the full review here.

Peter Bradshaw – Gaurdian

“There is a surprise in store for Jean, though due to the superhero-style weightlessness of the film’s events, this surprise doesn’t pack the psychological punch that it should. Fundamentally, we are heading for the same good-versus-evil showdown that closes out Marvel movies, with lots of digital effects. The battle here is certainly spirited, and Jessica Chastain looks intimidating as the alien Vuk – although the role is a waste of her talents. Magneto’s reappearance is sub-par, and so, frankly, is Michael Fassbender’s performance, although his character has been starved of the kind of interest devoted to his old rival Xavier. We are also denied a bullet-time setpiece sequence for Quicksilver (Evan Peters), which were witty features of previous installments.”

You can read the full review here.

Leah Greenblatt – Entertainment Weekly

“It’s true that X-Men have never exactly been the party clowns of the Marvel Universe; their hero status has always been conditional to fearful humans, and the chosen family of mutants they’ve landed in is less choice than necessity. Why should they have to banter for us, too? Still, for what is being called a final installment, it all tends to feel both anticlimactic and a little grim in the end. Not that anything Marvel is ever really over; fans only have to hold their breath for horror spin-off The New Mutants, due next April.”

You can read the full review here.