As per usual a movie review will contain things called spoilers, if you or someone you know is allergic to spoilers please do not read.
I’ll be candid, I approached the new Fantastic Four the same way one would approach a hot stove after suffering a bad burn. I still have the scar from being subjected to Galactus being a giant storm cloud. I tried my darnedest to avoid any sort of reviews to sway me one way or another before seeing the Fantastic Four reboot. It didn’t help, I burned my hand real good. Again.
First and foremost, this is not a Fantastic Four movie. Sure there’s a guy on fire, a girl who can turn invisible, the stretchy guy, and the big rock monster thingy but that’s about the only resemblance to the source material. A Fantastic Four movie, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, should be as out there and wacky as your SFX budget can afford. I want The Negative Zone. I want Anhillus and his insect army. I want Moloids of all shapes and sizes. What we got was a mishmash of ideas that seem borrowed from other movies that leads to a tonally inconsistent mess, or if you want to look on the bright side – maybe it’s because someone grabbed a script out of the closet of unused scripts I imagine Fox keeps and went in and crossed out the original character names and wrote in all the associated names. Character development is sparse at best. Reed Richards could be substituted for any atypical smart guy. Ben Grimm, who refers to himself as “the tough guy” of the group never really shows how he earns that reputation. Johnny can build anything and Sue can spot patterns and likes Portishead. That’s about it folks, I wish I was kidding.
The film opens with Reed and Ben, in what feels very much like a Spielberg film, working on a matter transporter, they can send objects elsewhere but it doesn’t come back, instead replaced by some kind of mystery dust. We then fast forward seven years to a science fare where Reed and Ben have almost perfected the matter transporter, at least allowing them to recall the object previously teleported, where they are approached by Dr. Franklin Richards, a scientist who has been working on something similar who needs Reed to help perfect the design. All with the promise that they’ll be the first to step foot in the new dimension. Reed accepts and with the help of brother / sister duo Sue and Johnny Storm and Victor Von Doom they get the machine working and successfully teleport a computer generated monkey and bring him back. At this point the government steps in, because it’s what governments do in these types of movies, and say they will take over and Reed and company won’t get to go play on the landscape they discovered. Victor, Johnny and Reed decide this is a perfect time to get drunk and – during the course of their banter – decide that it’s the perfect time to plant their flag and be the first to travel in the new machine. Reed calls Ben and the four of them hop off to go explore.
The trip that gives then their powers is the result of drunken bravado. I’ll say it again because it bears repeating. The trip that gives then their powers is the result of drunken bravado.
Hmmmm, maybe drunkenly exploring uncharted territory on a lark was a bad idea after all?
The trip goes about as well as you can expect. Victor – as the 8,567th causality of people not being able to keep a grip on someone else dangling off a cliff in movies – is last seen tumbling into alien quasi-lava. As Sue manages to save their collective butts and beam them back, Johnny’s chamber is hit by a fireball and Ben is pelted by alien pebbles as the teleporter sucks them back to Earth. After all that, Sue gets caught in the blast wave. Reed wakes up to find himself stretched out, literally, on a hospital bed. Remember that oh-so-friendly military we mentioned earlier? Well they’ve moved the four team members to a secret military installation which Reed promptly escapes from. About an hour into a less than two hour-long film and we finally have people using superpowers.
We then fast forward a year. Oh I’m sorry, were you expecting to see this film show how a group of 18-20 year old’s come to terms with their life altering transformations? Nope, we fast forward a @#$%ing year! Reed is still on the lam and the military is using The Thing as a secret weapon with designs to get the portal technology working again so they can create more super soldiers, of course they’re spinning the situation like they want to help ‘fix’ the three. The problem is they need Reed for that, so, enter Sue and that one character trait where she can decipher patterns to find the guy who’s been evading a whole government for a year in 10 minutes (yes my eyes rolled a bit here). Reed falls for the “we’re here to help” speech and off goes the government team who run into Victor, who’s totally still alive and had his spacesuit bonded to his skin. Victor is needless to say a little bitter and for about 5 minutes the film becomes the live action equivalent of Tesuo escaping from the hospital in Akira as he uses mind bullets to start exploding people’s heads. Victor heads back to the other planet and leaves a permanent link open between the two which causes Earth to start get sucked into something like a black hole. We then fill 9 of the last 10 minutes of the movie with our four heroes saving the Earth and something akin to joy begins to wash over me as I realize the ordeal is over.
So here we stand, a movie built around a comic where there are flying cars, egg shaped robots, and more dimensions than you could care to shake a stick at spent all but about 20 minutes on Earth dealing with horrible overused tropes and plot devices. By origin movie standards this is pretty far down on the list. How far down on the list? I’d rather watch Ang Lee’s version of Hulk which, while missing in other crucial elements, at least gave Bruce Banner some depth of character. By action superhero movie standards there’s practically none. Some running from alien lava, a brief but imaginative fight between Reed and the soldiers sent to capture him and the final fight with Doom and seriously that’s it.
He’s reaching for his dignity
The casting works all around, no one really jumps out as either scene stealing or out of their element, they’re simply there doing the best they can with the material they were handed. Having seen both Whiplash and House of Cards I know Teller and Mara are more than capable of holding down a lead role, in the proper team’s hands. The problem here is these are not the right team’s hands. The script was written by one of the people who brought us the abomination known as X-Men 3: Last Stand and while Josh Trask’s visual style is occasionally interesting, this is his only his third directorial role and he doesn’t quite have the chops to come off as anything other than derivative. If you do watch the film, the opening 20 minutes feels like an homage to Steven Spielberg or Joe Dante, which while not horrible choices to emulate, you have to fully commit to it (like Abrams did with Super 8) you can’t just drop this part so far into the film.
While everyone was making a big to-do about the fact that they decided to cast Johnny Storm as a black man, that part actually felt very organic and was handled in the space of about 30 seconds that made perfect, logical sense. Sue was adopted from Kosovo into the Storm family and it’s never brought up again. The bigger to-do from my standpoint was Thing’s lack of pants. Please don’t mistake this as an excuse for yours truly to make a sophomoric rock penis joke, for once it’s actually not that kind of party. You can tell the animators had issues with how that area should…umm hang. If you’re looking at Thing from, say, the navel up, the modelling looks fine. When they show him in full frame it kinda falls apart, almost like Thing had been skipping leg day at the gym. Putting The Thing in shorts or pants would have actually made the animators lives a lot easier. Beyond that, it would have also been nice to not model him to look like, and yes I’m aware I’m dating myself here, the Rock Biter from The Neverending Story.
Doom is by far the biggest disappointment in this film. Doctor Doom, as far as I’m concerned, is THE bad guy when it comes to Marvel villains. Who doesn’t love an Eastern European despot who has both wonderful technology, magical powers, and the ego to think his harebrained schemes will actually work? We don’t get that Doom, we don’t even get something close to that Doom. When we first see Victor, he’s living like the stereotypical online troll: Victor is one of those, “rebelling against whatever you’ve got” twenty-somethings. Reed is talking to Sue? He’s angry even though Stevie Wonder could see that Reed has zero game. Government creeping in on his research? Oh, he mad. Getting marooned in another dimension when the planet tries to eat everyone? He’s mad, at least on this point I can see why he’s mad. By the time the phrase “There is no Victor, there is only Doom” came on screen I was convinced that I had rolled my eyes back so hard that they would never come back to their normal position.
Is there an after credits scene? I don’t know, honestly the thought of sitting there any longer never crossed my mind. However, according to the interwebs, there is not.
FBI SCORE: 3/10
I saw Fantastic Four so you don’t have to. This is one of those morbid curiosities that should only be seen at 2pm on a rainy Sunday when there’s nothing else on television. The kindest thing I can say is that this will most likely be the death knell of the franchise for FOX and with a bit of luck Marvel will reclaim the rights and make a proper Fantastic Four film. Usually the third time is the charm but in this case it’ll have to be the fifth.
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