X-men: Dark Phoenix

The X Men series has been rolling out films for much of the last two decades. But it doesn’t always rise to its full potential – content to cruise on some fairly familiar superhero tropes (the two different approaches to action from Professor Xavier and Magneto, the mutants saving a world that hates and fears them, using powers as a metaphor for teenage angst). And “Dark Phoenix”, while it’s not the worst of the films, is one of the more underwhelming. There’s a lot of things that seem to be here just because they’ve been done before – the last three films have deliberately each been a decade apart, but while the last three films used the respective decades of 60s, 70s and 80s to add a bit of visual flair, there’s nothing essentially 90s-ish about this – it’s shot with no particular personality at all. The cast are reasonably decent but don’t get a lot to do to bust out of the scripted motions (James McAvoy maybe gets a bit more guilt, and Nicholas Hoult gets to be a bit angrier) – everybody else coming back tends to be blanded out. Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey is meant to be the featured character, but she’s rarely really given much of a chance to do more than stand around, look angry and smash things.  Jessica Chastain gets a chance to be just as much an undercharacterised baddy as Oscar Isaac’s Apocalypse from the last film – she never really gets a chance to be anything other than a vague tempter on Jean’s shoulder, without any real impact. In the end, this isn’t actively awful, but it is, alas, mostly pretty dull.