Dark Phoenix

The spectacle is entertaining, up to a point, but even the digital wizardry wears thin, and Dark Phoenix turns into a standard-brand miasma of explosions, collisions and swirling force fields.

Turner delivers a solid performance as a young woman coming to grips with an unknown force, and James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender maintain the frenemy bond we've grown to love.

A middlin' X-men effort that cheats the saga of its past, present and future, messing with the story-line in unacceptable ways. Plus, it looks big and cheap - but mostly cheap.

Outgunned on the action front by box-office rivals and too nervous to tell a more intimate story, Dark Phoenix leaves the franchise running on empty.

It's as if the writer-director [Simon Kinberg] is using a superhero movie to rediscover the roots of soap opera. His emphasis on everything Young about the franchise swamps everything that's Adult.

It felt terribly, terribly scrappy.

Dark Phoenix is certainly bad for the normal reasons a movie is bad, but it’s the passionless obligation with which the film operates that the most dispiriting aspect about it.

All the heart and intricacy that once made the franchise so distinct has been disintegrated. Unlike the titular character however, nothing stronger rises from the ashes. Only something devoid of passion.

Dark Phoenix ends up being what everyone feared it would be: a movie that didn’t matter, at all. One that didn’t even try to pay homage to an extraordinary saga that notably influenced the comic-book genre.

This fresh attempt is not poorly made exactly as The Last Stand was&#59; instead it is a fairly risible effort for all new reasons.