X-Men: Dark Phoenix review – mutant franchise fizzles out forgettably
Sophie Turner stars in Jean Grey’s 90s-set origin story that offers glimpses of intrigue before regressing into a dull CGI-fest
Almost as an aftershock from that gigantic finish to the Marvel Cinematic Universe saga that was Avengers: Endgame, the X-Men series now comes to its own weirdly anticlimactic end. Or maybe it’s truer to say that the prequel series showing the mutants’ younger selves – with James McAvoy rather than Patrick Stewart as Xavier, and Michael Fassbender rather than Ian McKellen as Magneto – has now circled in on itself as far as it can. There is no place to go other than forward to the present day, where we came in.
X-Men: First Class (2011) started us in the 1960s, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) took us to a mind-bendingly alternative 1970s and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) found the mutants in the 1980s with glimpses of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley. Now we are in the early 90s, and Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is pointing out the misogyny of the gang’s title: the female mutants are saving everyone’s asses – maybe they should be called the X-Women.