Saw this yesterday and given all the talk about it I was expecting a hair pullingly offensively stupid and poorly done movie with terrible dialog, terrible production values and terrible performances.
And... Saw none of that. So... Bull**** fanboy hyperbole strikes yet again, where product that is mediocre or middle of the road is somehow a crime against all art on every conceivable level and things which are good or even great get placed on a plateau akin to divinity and beyond any reasonable criticism whatsoever.
It's so ****ing tiring...
There will never be an honest reading of this movie I think claiming it was a masterpiece of super hero cinema. It has an all around flatness and feels rushed. I can totally believe the idea it was supposed to be a two part send off of the Fox Mutant films which had to be drastically rejiggered (in what is a seeming to be a common sequence of events for CBMs outside of the MCU) due to studio executives and bean counters deciding, partially in response to the loudest and most militant voices making their opinons known via social media (like the Hype) making their displeasure known for such extended and widespread a time, to cut the legs off underneath the film making reshoots and rewrites necessary. And even then what has been delivered is just... bland, not a dumpster fire.
The movie's content by a wide margin is in no way totally incompetent. The production values aren't bad, music is good, cinematography is fine and the performers are for the most part fine with dialog that isn't either terrible or cheezy.
Does that mean it's a good CBM worth seeing again? No. Because nothing is offensively bad it's just the story, the plot, the arcs the emotional heft... It's all rather flat and very by the numbers. There is nothing Razzie worthy but I can't say it amounts up to anything particularly interesting or engaging either. There is an attempt to make some statements about certain characters but that mostly goes nowhere. It's injected into the film bit then the follow up is just restating it and then it doesn't go anywhere. Some characters while not handled badly are just more or less background.
My feelings towards this and the seeming widespread response I have seen mirrors how I felt about Green Lantern. GL was a very mediocre movie that was essentially a greatest hits of super hero films that just failed to hit the mark because it was so often just humdrum and lifeless. But it wasn't cast badly and despite all the yelling online about it the effects, yeah even the CGI suit, are not bad. It's just a dull film which could never get over a merely servicable and uninspired script. Same with Dark Phoenix.
The Fox X-Men films were a mixed bag right from the start. I will always try to remind fans how they did contribute greatly to the super hero film movement as a whole and gave us some truly iconic castings in roles people wanted to see come to life on the big screen for years and years. It is no doubt disappointing to see the X-Men proper go out with such a whimper with a very forgettable movie. At the same time that's all this was... Mediocre and forgettable. A flat film which just didn't gel together the way it was conceived to. But it's not some gigantic misfire either.