Dark Phoenix: 10 Ways It's The Worst X-Men Film Yet
7. The Boring Action
20th Century Fox
In an age where Captain America is wielding Mjolnir and action scenes feature dozens of heroes at once, Dark Phoenix is just inadequate.
Apart from Magneto, who gets to do all sorts of interesting and gruesome stuff in the final act, action in the latest X-Men never amounts to anything more than an anticlimax. Gone are the fan-favourite Quicksilver segments of DOFP and Apocalypse, or even the same intricate level of set design. Here, nearly every fight is centred around a mundane location, be that a street, a hallway or - wait! - another street.
Everything is weirdly mundane, and no mutant ever gets the chance to illustrate their abilities in a way that wasn't already portrayed more impressively in a previous film. Storm's lightning looks as though it's tickling the D'Bari aliens in the finale, Magneto has gone from moving bridges to moving subway trains, and the full might of the Phoenix Force doesn't look anymore impressive than what the series has already shown off.
It's all just a tad anticlimactic, and for a film that brings to a close the entire X-Men series, that's just not appropriate.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
