| Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: June 7, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
9
Mixed:
32
Negative:
11
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Critic Reviews
Jun 5, 2019
To an extent, the movie waters down its moral complexity by introducing a flat-out villainess, who begins to guide Jean’s actions, thus absolving Jean of some moral responsibility. Still, it’s hard to complain when the villainess is played by Jessica Chastain, the best person in the world to play a cool, coiffed, composed entity of evil, looking for a new planet for her displaced people.
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Jun 4, 2019
Dark Phoenix is ultimately yet another fumbled take on the classic saga from the Marvel Comics, albeit one without the side plots of The Last Stand. Add to it a jarringly uneven latter half and some underdeveloped cosmic villains, and Dark Phoenix is fortunate to have not fully ended the X-Men’s current big screen run on a completely down note.
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Jun 6, 2019
Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.
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Jun 5, 2019
It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was X-Men: Apocalypse.
On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand.
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Jun 6, 2019
Dark Phoenix was always destined to fail. Limiting the sprawling story to one main arc severely debilitates the original’s emotional resonance, but avoiding Apocalypse’s swollen plot and stakes-less character narratives means reigning in an essentially big saga and cutting all of its awe down to some rote CGI. To make this work in one movie is to deny the essence of the source text.
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Jun 5, 2019
Jun 6, 2019
Kinberg does better when he goes big, which suits this franchise delivery system. For the most part he just moves characters from point A to B, pausing for face-to-face heart to hearts before the next blowout. But the mayhem is generally coherent and executed with clean, crisp special effects, even if Kinberg settles for slo-mo clichés.
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Jun 5, 2019
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.
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Jun 5, 2019
Despite the frequent verbal confrontation scenes in which characters lash out at one another, soap opera style, for lying or serving their selfish interests, Dark Phoenix doesn’t come close to carrying the emotional impact of so many Marvel Universe films where the characters come across as complicated, relatable and three-dimensional.
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The PlaylistJun 4, 2019
Its atrocious, expository dialogue, cumbersome plot, whiplashing character motivations, unintentionally funny moments, and often corny costumes, ensures, Dark Phoenix will be remembered in the annals of mediocre movies (and for somehow utterly wasting Jessica Chastain, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and James McAvoy in the same film).
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Jun 4, 2019
I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.
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