YMMV / The Phantom (1996)

• Awesome Music: Not for the first time, David Newman provides a rousing score that's better than the movie it supports.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The scene where the skeleton kills Styles.
• Ethnic Scrappy: The kid. Thankfully, he's only in the movie for something like five minutes at the very beginning.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Two heroes named Quill and Drax, in Avengers: Infinity War, meet the same end as the similarly-named characters in this movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: We have a Superhero movie with heroes named Quill and Drax.
• Ho Yay: Sala (the female sky pirate who switches sides) seems to have as much of a "thing" for Diana as she does for Kit ("I think us girls should stick together"). Also, all her fellow Sky Pirates were also women.
• Lost in Medias Res: Often cited as the source of the film's failure. The film actually begins with a potted summary of the original Phantom's origin story 400 years before the events of the plot, led in by the caption "FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE". Both the title card and the fact that the brief prologue doesn't intersect with the plot until the climax might have hindered as much as they helped.
• Narm: "Ha! What a cheap jungle trick!"
• Nightmare Fuel: The microscope. Doubles as Paranoia Fuel: quite a few viewers have commented that it made them wary of using scopes in Real Life.
  Fleming: *Bloodcurdling Scream.*
  Drax: Well, I guess you won't be needing these anymore. *Breaks Fleming's glasses.*
• Special Effect Failure: As the police chase the Phantom through the park, they fire guns at him. The bullets all miss, but somehow produce Bullet Sparks while hitting trees.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kabai Sengh's final line "You're not immortal. I know your secrets, Phantom." How he came by this information, and whether it's commonly known among the rest of the Brotherhood (when speaking to Quill in front of the group, he refers to many of them killing The Phantom, singular, over the years) and what sort of threat someone like that could pose to The Phantom would make for a compelling adventure.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The Phantom's superhero costume is... controversial. On one hand, it's very faithful to the source material, but transposing the purple spandex from a comic strip in the 1930's in a very literal way to a live-action action blockbuster in the 1990's is pretty gaudy, if not outright laughable. There's a big reason why Movie Superheroes Wear Black became codified a mere four years later.

---