OK we’ve all (and by “we all” I mean “me and only me”) had some fun here but after almost two hours of X M E N D A R K P H O E N I X I’m going to say that X M E N D A R K P H O E N I X is not exactly “good” but it might be better than the last two installments by The Sex Criminal?
There’s this core of Charles Xavier is a Controlling Egomaniac Who Fucks With People’s Brains that keys into the screaming theme of Dudes Afraid of/Trying to Control the Agency of Women. They hit the Professor X is a Dick Gong really hard! I’m here for this!
A lot of the dramatic scenes almost work? Some of them have decent low-key energy? Gameathrones really can’t do anything with a lot of this dialogue but she sells the emotion pretty well when just alone and throbbing with misunderstood power? They throw away a lot of this when it’s enough for Charles to say “I’m just real sorry!” at the end? The Main Villain probably shouldn’t have stolen a woman’s body, because it muddles the Themes? Oh well!
All the action movie shit in the 1st 2/3rds is limp and ridiculous. All the X-persons doing X-person shit? The first big action scene is Two Separate Bunches o’ Mutants trying to be the first to cross a street? It’s Competitive Mutant Frogger. One of Magneto’s buddies is just a lady who says You Are Not The Only Mindmutanto! to Xavier before striking a pose with her knife and holding that very same pose for the entire scene. She just stands there. I guess this is supposed to lock him down, mentally, for the duration, but it’s not made very clear and it looks almost as silly as the whole situation does when you realize all these super-powered motherfuckers are just trying to cross two lanes of traffic?
Magneto’s other Exclusive Hench Mutant uses his dreadlocks as whips.
All the guard’s for the Climactic Train Sequence have the same model of shotgun but they’ve treated them as submachineguns in post re: sound effects and digital muzzle flares, etc. They still have spare shells in caddies on the stocks? Maybe they decided it’d be more exciting to go Tons of Automatic Fire, but they were stuck with those props, and oh well. Maybe someone realized on the day that those particular shotguns didn’t exist in 1992? In any case this is extremely important.
This Climactic Sequence is a continuity mess but probably has better Mad Superpowering than most of the rest of the franchise. It is not great, but it’s never been great, and the individual pieces are OK on their own. Magneto crushes an entire train car of groot aliens and throws it away like a soda can? Teleporting devil boy is inexplicably moved to Knife Rampage by the death of the guard that set the mutants free? Storm looks kinda regal while she shoots lightning at people? It’s never clear why Beast throwing these aliens bodily would be more effective than bullets? Yeah!
It’s fine!
The emotional catharsis of the end actually kinda works and then you cut to
look at this fuckin doofus
look at this photoshop they had to do because it wasn’t in Jennifer Lawrence’s contract to sit for a head shot in makeup and she absolutely refused to do anything that she was not legally bound to
Anyway this movie is Not A Good Movie but it is Not The Disaster It Is Reputed To Be IMO it’s fine, just fine, as these things go. It’s solidly mediocre! There are some good scenes! It wasn’t made by a definite sex criminal!
Thank you for reading these several paragraphs about a mediocrity, written in a haze.
