Dark Phoenix: 10 Ways It's The Worst X-Men Film Yet

9. The Stilted Acting

One thing you could always depend upon in the X-Men series was for some great character drama. The original films boasted a formidable cast in Sir Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman, while the newer trilogy found similar success with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence. For some reason or another though, that same cast fails to deliver in Dark Phoenix.

McAvoy's performance as Xavier in the film is somewhat curious. He'd delivered such fantastic turns as the character in First Class and Days of Future Past respectively, but Dark Phoenix turns the character into a maudlin shadow of his former self. The script in no way helps McAvoy's case, giving the actor fleetingly little to do even while flirting with the occasionally interesting concept, but the execution still feels off.

Likewise, Lawrence - clearly very tired of having to don the blue makeup by now - turns up for the first act of the film in an equally unfamiliar guise, before being promptly killed off. There's no sense of warmth between either her or Charles in the beginning, and it makes her inevitable death and the aftermath of it (littered with pathetic fallacy, by the way), strangely unaffecting.

Frustratingly, the two actors who turn in the worst performances of Dark Phoenix are Sophie Turner and Jessica Chastain. Neither are given the opportunity to deliver varied performances, with Chastain in particular wasted in scene after scene of painful exposition dumps.