X-Men Dark Phoenix Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs

1. The Snappy Pacing & Short Runtime

Dark Phoenix may be a worse film than X-Men: Apocalypse on the balance of its merits, but it at least feels like much less of a slog.

Clocking in at "just" 114 minutes, it's a positively scant runtime for the standards of most modern superhero films, and a whole half-hour shorter than the wildly bloated Apocalypse.

The result is a film that, while fundamentally bad, at least doesn't stick around in any one place for too long, and even when boredom sets in, it's generally not too long before the film is trying something else.

It moves fast, even to the point of feeling rushed at times perhaps, but when so little effort is being put into the storytelling, characters and action, it's surely for the best that it doesn't waste too much of the audience's time in the process, right?