This is the second time the series has attempted to adapt what’s probably the most famous story line from the X-Men comics: the saga of an alien entity that inhabits the mind of the mutant Jean Grey and gives her incredible destructive power. Such chronological messiness would be easy to forgive if it served any larger purpose, but it’s only a side effect of the many reinventions the X-Men have suffered as they’ve struggled to keep pace with the billion-dollar Avengers movies.ĭark Phoenix is a case in point. In practice, all this means is that Fassbender, an actor in his early 40s, looks painfully implausible as Magneto, a character who survived the Holocaust and should be pushing 60 by now (not to mention that he’s supposed to be aging into Ian McKellen in the next few years). The film is set in 1992, ostensibly to satisfy the bizarre continuity that’s been haltingly laid out over the past six X-Men movies. But despite the epic nature of the story it’s adapting, the whole project comes off as chintzy and slapdash. Dark Phoenix has stars such as Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender, and it has some spectacular-looking action sequences where superpowered mutants do glorious battle. The X-Men series has none of the calibrated polish of the main Marvel movies, in which every post-credits scene and superstar cameo points toward a five-year road map of films designed to dominate at the box office. More than anything, though, Dark Phoenix feels quaint. The movie is a mostly bad, self-serious rehash of story arcs that have been put on film before.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which will likely be the last go-round with these characters before Disney’s merger with 20th Century Fox folds the enterprise into the former’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, makes for an underwhelming finale.

Some have been good, some absolutely awful, and plenty have fallen somewhere in the middle. But in the 19 years since, the X-Men movie franchise (owned by 20th Century Fox) has released 12 films, seven in the main series and five Wolverine- and Deadpool-focused spin-offs. Superhero movies in general were a box-office gamble, the kind of project that stars and big directors tended to avoid.

When X-Men was released, in 2000, the idea of a comic-book “cinematic universe” wasn’t even a glint in the eyes of Marvel executives.

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