Tweet S o appallingly dull that even a third-act parade of exploding heads can't rouse interest, Fantastic Four may be the most minor Marvel Comics film yet. And at this dispiritingly late date, that's saying something indeed. It also adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any
Fantastic Four’ Movie Review How bad is this reboot of Marvel's first superheroes? Worse than you can imagine The latest reboot of the Fantastic Four — the cinematic equivalent of malware — is worse than worthless. It not only scrapes the bottom of the Marvel-movie barrel; it knocks out the floor and sucks audiences into a black hole of soul-crushing, coma-inducing dullness. And, guess what, it’s an origin story. That’s right. A gifted young cast Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan has been hired to freshen the plot, like an old whore trying to pass as jailbait. No go. Trending Director Josh Trank Chronicle, who wrote the soggy script with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, takes forever to get things going. Reed Richards Teller, acting NAÏVE in capital letters is a science prodigy recruited by Dr. Franklin Storm Reg E. Cathey to join his rogue think tank. Storm’s adopted daughter Sue Mara is a willing participant. His car-crazy son, Johnny Jordan, not so much. Mara and Jordan are given nothing to act so you can only watch as they lose the will to try. Toby Kebbell as Victor Von Doom, Dr. Storm’s embittered pupil, overcompensates by overdoing everything. But he’s the bad guy. You can tell because he keeps giving shit to Reed’s BFF, Ben Grimm Bell. Everyone pretends to be excited by Reed’s invention, a teleporter which can transport a monkey into an alternate dimension. Since this movie has no dimension at all, everyone is envious of the monkey. So, of course, they jump into the teleporter and gets transformed into — spoiler alert! — the Fantastic Four. Except nothing about this misbegotten, cynical attempt at franchise-rebuilding is fantastic. That includes the crude, cheap-looking, unspecial effects that turn Reed into the stretchy Mr. Fantastic, Johnny into the Human Torch, Sue into the Invisible Woman and Ben into a pile of rocks called The Thing. Fantastic Four is a pile of something, too. You fill in the blank.
TheFour fight amongst themselves and take off for separate adventures, occasionally coming together for unbelievably convenient collisions. Ben's story is the most compelling, while the others' issues become repetitive. The film also includes its share of logical inconsistencies, as well as overly familiar and underdeveloped themes.Fantastic Four Maybe "Fantastic Four" is a cursed property, or maybe just one that shouldn't be turned into a film? In any case, this new version, directed by Josh Trank, is the third major big screen attempt to tell the story of Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm aka The Thing and Dr. Doom, the core characters in one of Marvel Comics' most durable properties. The good news is, it's short. The bad news is, it feels longer than an afternoon spent at the DMV—and at least at the DMV, you can pass the time by people-watching. There are no people to watch in "Fantastic Four," only collections of character traits and attitudes brought fitfully to life by actors who might've mistakenly thought they were hitching a ride on the superhero movie gravy train by signing up for this misfire. The movie starts off on an intriguing note, with 11-year old Reed Richards and his buddy Ben Grimm meeting for the first time when Reed sneaks into Grimm's family's junkyard to steal a transformer he needs to build a tiny teleportation device. Then the movie flashes forward to the present day, with Reed, now played by Miles Teller, and Ben, played by Jamie Bell, wreaking havoc with their invention at a science fair. Although the machine browns-out the power and creates an unnerving rumble and shatters a backboard in the gymnasium, it's an impressive enough display to cause Dr. Franklin Storm Reg E. Cathey to hire Teller to work at the Baxter Institute, which has been trying to solve the mystery of Planet Zero, the place where Reed's teleported objects always end up. The next hour of the film is another superhero origin story, introducing the doctor's two kids, the super-intelligent, science-minded Sue Storm Kate Mara and her juvenile delinquent brother Johnny Michael B. Jordan, who's introduced in a street race that feels like an outtake from a "Fast and the Furious" movie. The comic's arch-villain Dr. Victor von Doom what a name; wonder if he changed it from "Vahndüm"? is also part of the team, and if you know even a little bit about the source material, you wait for the other iron boot to drop and turn him into an all-powerful megalomaniac. Doom used to be Sue's boyfriend and doesn't take kindly to the way she and Reed banter over keyboards and monitors. He's played by Toby Kebbell, who, to borrow a line from Andrew Sarris, looks like half the waiters on Melrose Avenue, but is quite good. His world-weariness and punk-Byronic glowering contrasts appealingly against the blandness of the other characters—even Jordan's Johnny, who's supposed to be a hot-rodding bad-boy a la Han Solo but reads, rather like Chris Evans in the last "Four" films, like a muscular male ingenue who occasionally quips and a while, anyway, "The Fantastic Four" seems to be re-conceiving the superhero movie as a scientific mystery-adventure about how to solve the puzzle of the teleportation gate, send a manned mission to Planet Zero, and see what's there. This is only a partially effective approach, though, because the characters are so flat that not even this gifted cast can fill them with life, and because we're waiting for the characters to gain superpowers and figure out how to master them and then become a team. The latter is the whole point of an origin story, which has been rightly rapped as an overdone and mostly unimaginative movie template, but that still provides basic satisfaction when properly executed. You don't put the "getting powers" part an hour into a movie, as this one chose to, for some cockamamie reason, postponing the inevitable disastrous manned mission to Planet Zero, which is filled with body-warping cosmic radiation, until long past the point when anyone particularly cares about it. And after you've given your heroes and your bad guy their powers, you don't then suddenly veer off in another direction and make, essentially, "Fantastic Four, Part II," pitting the foursome which now includes the orange, rock-skinned super-tough-guy Ben against Doom in a series of battles that are packed into the space of about fifteen minutes, look and sound and feel unoriginal and cheap, and don't even explore the characters' abilities, and their emotional response to those abilities, in compelling ways. Ben in particular is ill-served. He doesn't have any of the personality demonstrated in the comics and even in previous film versions. He's just a quiet, nice guy, a stick figure, even when he's transformed. And once he is transformed, the film doesn't spend one minute asking what it's like to suddenly be a giant, rock-encrusted monster with stony Muppet lips. Ben just seems to be all right with it. I've heard of easygoing, but this is ridiculous. He acts like somebody gave him a haircut he didn't like. Oh, bummer, I wish this could grow blame for a disaster is always a tricky thing in reviews. Unless critics have intimate inside knowledge of everything that happened during a production, they end up citing other people's reported articles, which might or might not be accurate, depending on who's supplying them with facts, or "facts," and what their agendas are. We do know that Trank got fired off one of the "Star Wars" spin-off films, that he a producer on both that film and "Fantastic Four" don't like each other, that his enemies have painted him with the dreaded adjective "difficult", and that "Fantastic Four" underwent extensive re-shoots in the months leading up to release and Trank was not present for them. All of this complicates typical sentences in film reviews that treat the director as the captain of the cinematic ship rightly or wrongly. That's why I've said "the film" does this or that rather than "Trank". I have no idea why this movie is so terrible, only that it is terrible, and there is no joy in noting the terribleness of a film. A lot of people spent a lot of time and energy on "The Fantastic Four" and the result just sort of lies there. The tone and structure of "Fantastic Four" should be studied in film schools as an example of what not to do. It's as if somebody took two pretty-decent feature length movies, broke them into pieces, and re-edited them into one film, but without any discernible plan beyond "get this down to 90 minutes." This is not a shortness issue, though. It's an everything issue. I'm not convinced that the movie's problems could have been solved with more scenes. Better scenes, definitely. And better characters. And better dialogue. Teller and Mara and Jordan and the rest are excellent actors; we know this from seeing them in other movies. If you encountered them here for the first time, you'd wonder what anyone saw in them. There is a whorishness to the big-budget superhero genre right now, a palpable sense of opportunism and greed that gives even the most earnest entries a faintly cynical veneer. Movies like this one, which show no outward evidence of having been created for any reason except to make money, do nothing to dispel that. The Marvel factory is indeed a factory, stamping out pre-sold intellectual property widgets with movie stars and the best visual effects that money can buy, but even their least ambitious products work. This one doesn't. It's defective, a discard, a huge ball of metal and plastic and spandex, all fused together. It's impossible to tell what it was supposed to be. Matt Zoller Seitz Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of TV critic for New York Magazine and and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Now playing Film Credits Fantastic Four 2015 Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language 100 minutes Latest blog posts about 1 hour ago about 4 hours ago about 5 hours ago 1 day ago Comments
26O n screen, the Fantastic Four remain the poor relations of the Marvel superhero family. The first (2005) episode of last decade's F4 diptych at least showed some flippant pop-culture fizz. But
GamesRadar+ Verdict Ponderous, pretentious and, most damning of all, just not much fun. Flame off. It’s yawning all looked so good for Josh Trank a few months ago. A cult superhero flick to his name in 2012's Chronicle. A major-league Marvel movie in the can. And a Star Wars spin-off in the offing. And then came the mysterious departure from Star Wars and rumours of reshoots on said Marvel movie, whose initial cool promise became infected by bad is the end result an epic fail? No, but it’s certainly no major upgrade on Tim Story's barrel-scraping 2005 effort or its Silver Surfer sequel. Echoing Spider-Man's somewhat premature 2012 reboot, Trank’s origin story brings nothing new to the party, apart from a rather muted, real-world aesthetic that counters the colourful worlds dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the original Marvel comics. Such an approach might work for, say, Batman – but it doesn’t fit The Fantastic by Trank, X-Men regular Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, it’s the sort of self-important, humourless story that leaves you yearning for Robert Downey Jr. to pop up with an Iron Man quip. In denial that it’s even a superhero film “They’re not powers,” claims Kate Mara’s newly-invisible Sue Storm, it’s not until Jamie Bell’s Ben Grimm – aka rock-monster The Thing – yells his classic “clobbering time” catchphrase in the denouement that this disparate bunch even remotely resemble the Fantastic Four. Perhaps The Adolescent Arses might’ve been a better running time is a brief 99 minutes, yet Trank spends at least half of it watching our heroes brought together in a daring experiment to teleport matter. Leading the charge is Reed Richards Miles Teller, who has been building his own such machine since the fifth grade with childhood friend Ben. Winning over Dr. Franklin Storm Reg. E. Cathey, he’s given a scholarship to the Baxter Institute, where he’s introduced to Storm’s adopted brainiac daughter Sue and the equally smart Victor Von Doom Toby Kebbell.As it turns out, Reed’s early experiments have achieved similar results to those at Baxter transporting matter to another dimension. “That place could explain the origin of our species,” marvels Dr. Storm, in one of the many dreadful save-the-world speeches poor Cathey so good in House Of Cards must deliver. Joined by Storm’s tearaway son Johnny Michael B. Jordan, it's not long before Trank's team crack matter transportation – with Tim Blake Nelson’s suit threatening to take it all to those big boys at by this development, Reed, Johnny and Victor decide to test it out, to be the first humans to set foot on Planet Zero, as it gets dubbed. Bringing along old friend Ben for the ride, it doesn’t quite go to plan – what with Victor falling to his certain, ahem, doom and the others arriving back engulfed in radioactive energy. Even poor old Sue at the control desk gets a dose. Finally, almost an hour in, the Four’s freakish abilities come to the fore. By far the most evocative of these are Reed’s stretched-out limbs – a nightmarish bit of body The Thing looks great, but the rock-cladding seems to swallow Bell, who never really gets to grips with his character. Mara just floats around in a bubble and Jordan’s fiery Human Torch plays down his “flame on” phrase like he’s embarrassed to be here. With the quartet taken to top-secret government facility Area 57, Reed scarpering and the others learning to control their powers, it all lurches into a dreadfully dull final act, where Von Doom, all powered up from the energy-giving planet, gets a cob it better than watching Story's cast – a bendy-bodied Ioan Gruffudd, say, or Jessica Alba in a skin-tight catsuit? Hardly. Teller, so good in Whiplash, barely lives up to the name Mr. Fantastic here, while Mara is similarly functional; that she was an orphan adopted from Kosovo is just another canon-altering trait liable to irritate the fans. At least Kebbell – albeit unrecognisable under Von Doom’s costume – brings a little menace to us back to the bad old days when comic-book movies were second rate, there’s not much joy to be found here. It rather makes a mockery of the fact that, as our heroes step into their matter-transporting machine, the cry goes up “We’re about to make history.” But then at least there’s the possibility that, after three failed attempts including Roger Corman's unreleased '94 effort, the rights will be snapped up by Marvel Studios; then maybe this much-maligned superhero quartet might get the movie they deserve. More info Theatrical release6 August 2015 DirectorJosh Trank Starring"Miles Teller","Michael B Jordan","Kate Mara","Jamie Bell","Toby Kebbell","Reg E Cathey","Tim Blake Nelson" Available platformsMovie Less James Mottram is a freelance film journalist, author of books that dive deep into films like Die Hard and Tenet, and a regular guest on the Total Film podcast. You'll find his writings on GamesRadar+ and Total Film, and in newspapers and magazines from across the world like The Times, The Independent, The i, Metro, The National, Marie Claire, and MindFood. Most Popular
