By Tom Augustine
For a film series that has long since outstayed its welcome, the latest in the very first superhero saga – X-Men: Dark Phoenix (dir. Simon Kinberg, rated M) – seems to be in an awful hurry to wrap things up. The culmination (and likely finale) of the film series that began long ago with X-Men in 2000, and has seen actors and storylines come and go (with the occasional time-travel retcon here and there) is a zippy little thing that nevertheless seems bursting at the seams and sagging with the weight of a series that just can't seem to end, already. Returning to ground covered in the much-maligned X-Men: The Last Stand, this film follows the X-Men as they face one of their own, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner, who does well to hold the whole thing together in a cast of sleepwalkers) when exposure to cosmic rays gives her immense, uncontrollable powers.
One gets the impression from Dark Phoenix that the film-makers are trying to make up for the "sins" of that previous film, but this one commits too many of its own in trying to play it safe to fare any better. Packed with actors who seem desperate to simply run out their contracts (particularly Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique and Evan Peters as Quicksilver, whose brief appearances here may as well have featured them picking up their paychecks), the action itself is at least solidly entertaining and occasionally even thrilling. Indeed, there are moments of inspired genre film-making that occasionally elevate the whole operation, boosted by a reliably bombastic Hans Zimmer score. The inclusion of a nonsensical and unnecessary alien subplot slows things down enormously, and there is little in the way of catharsis or a sense of an ending here – if it is to be the end of this iteration of Professor X, Magneto, Cyclops and the like, they've gone out less with a bang than a whimper. Rating: Two-and-a-half stars.
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