X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Relight My Firebird

- Dave Golder

The curtain draws on Fox’s X-Men franchise with a film that’s had the marketing push and online buzz of a non-committal shrug. Which is a shame, because Dark Phoenix gamely tries to inject some new life into the Marvel movie mutants. For a good while it succeeds, until the final act when it comes across more like the cinematic embodiment of, “Oh, what’s the point?”

Let’s cut to the chase, though. What you really want to know is whether it’s better than its overblown, hollow predecessor X-Men: Apocalypse and the train wreck of a film whose multiple failings it’s trying to rectify, X-Men: The Last Stand. The answer is an emphatic yes in both cases. So that’s a relief. But it’s no X2 or First Class.

In case you’ve been out of the loop (and, as we said, the publicity has been suspiciously low-key, so it’s likely), Dark Phoenix is a second cinematic attempt at one of the X-Men comics’ most loved storylines, in which Jean Grey becomes host to an alien force that makes her cosmically powerful and eventually – since cosmic power corrupts cosmically – a destroyer of worlds.