Sometimes Screen Junkies takes on objectively good movies for the company’s Honest Trailers series. Those tend to be a bit more nit-picky and less interesting than the videos made about terrible films. And because of that, it’s with great glee that I get to share the Honest Trailer for “Dark Phoenix.”
As you might expect, given the Screen Junkies’ track record, they don’t pull any punches when it comes to Fox’s most recent ‘X-Men’ film. Sure, fans might argue that “Dark Phoenix” isn’t the bottom of the barrel X-film. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” or even “X-Men: Apocalypse” are likely worse than Simon Kinberg’s directorial debut. However, there’s no denying that “Dark Phoenix” is a bad film.
And in the Honest Trailer, no stone is left unturned. The film’s lowlights include the scene where Professor X is being forced to “walk” upstairs, the ridiculous constipation faces that the characters give us when they’re utilizing their powers, and of course, my personal favorite, the film’s lone f-bomb, said in the most hilarious and out of character way by Cyclops.
But really, the crux of what makes “Dark Phoenix” so bad, and what Screen Junkies seems to come back to again and again is just how the film is just a rehash of a bad film that was already made in the X-franchise that is based on a really good comic book storyline. And in this new version, Kinberg and the rest of the folks involved basically forgot everything that made the classic story so beloved and presented a sub-par superhero film that is the de facto finale to a 20-year-old franchise. Disappointing doesn’t even begin to describe that.