Released: August 2015
Director: Josh Trank
Distributor: Fox Studios
Rated PG-13
Run Time: 100 Minutes
Cast:
Miles Teller: Reed Richards
Michael B. Jordan: Johnny Storm
Kate Mara: Sue Storm
Jamie Bell: Ben Grimm
Toby Kebbell: Victor Von Doom
Fans of the Fantastic 4 comics have been asking what it’s going to take to get a good Fantastic 4 movie. Well, after an aborted attempt during the 90s, two sub-par movies 8-10 years back, and now a reboot, I have an answer for that question: Fox Studios has to give up control of the license to Marvel, because they clearly are unable to make a good movie based on those characters. It’s a shame, because Fantastic 4 has the potential to be an awesome new franchise. Fox Studios has released many a good movie over the decades, and has released some pretty lousy ones. They struck gold with X-Men back in 2000, and launched a new film franchise that is more popular than ever. They also released Daredevil which was critically panned back in 2003. So far, the only comic book movies that Fox has actually managed to be successful with is…..X-men. Even then, that franchise had its ups and downs. So what makes Fantastic 4 not so fantastic?
The movie begins with a young Reed Richards and Ben Grimm working on a project that could have the potential to teleport people from one place to another. Years later, Reed is at it again at a school science fair where he’s noticed by a top-notch scientist, and his adopted daughter, Sue Storm. They’re working on the same kind of project he is, but they feel that Reed has managed to crack inter-dimensional travel. So they offer him a scholarship and a job designing a teleportation device. I’m not going to on with the story, aside from the fact that it’s a run-of-the-mill origin story. I don’t know if filmmakers have noticed, but the audience is pretty much sick and tired of these f**king origin stories. Every time a comic book movie series is rebooted, we are treated with another origin story and quite frankly, I’m tired of it. It’s unnecessary. We know about these characters. We know that they get their powers from something cosmic or something of that nature. Stop treating us like we’re morons. We have the Internet. We have Wikipedia. We can find out about these stories in a split second. So, what’s worse than an origin story? An origin story where nothing f**king happens. I kid you not: It takes a good hour just to get our four heroes to get their powers. Say what you will about the 2005 film, but the characters got their powers within 20 minutes of the film starting. I appreciate good build-up, but Fantastic 4 takes its sweet time establishing the characters. That’s not good for a superhero movie.
This is a movie that had some serious issues, even before it started filming, but I’ll get to that later. If the story sucks, what about the rest of the film? Is it salvageable? Not really, no. To start, the acting is atrocious. The acting is flat all across the board. Nobody is convincing and they all behave like cardboard cutouts on a treadmill. Kate Mara only has one facial expression throughout the whole movie and Toby Kebbell is trying to ham it up as Doom. Now, there has been some controversy over casting an African-American in a role that was generally for white guys. I don’t really see the issue if the character is well-written and performed admirably. The problem is, is that Johnny Storm is so horrendously written, that not even Michael B. Jordan could salvage it. The story sucks and the acting sucks, so what’s left? The action and visual effects, of course. Boy, the ball was dropped on this one. There are certain action sequences that you see in the trailers that don’t make it into the final film. What the hell? The only real action that the movie has is basically at the tail end. You can’t have an action movie without action in it! Thankfully, the action that we DO get to witness is actually not bad. The final battle between our 4 heroes and Doom is something you need to see to believe. It’s actually pretty spectacular. The visual effects, for the most part, are pants. Look what they did to Doom:
Really? Three movies later and this is what they come up with?! When you see him in the final film, he’s glowing green in parts and looks like an alien. I’m astonished that they screwed Doom up AGAIN. On top of that, The Thing is absolutely atrocious. He’s completely CG. Look at the previous two films, and it’s an actual actor in a suit. It was far more convincing, and they had a better actor in Michael Chiklis. Some people had complained about his lack of pants. Really? The character is so horrifically rendered, that all you’re worried about is that he doesn’t have pants?! Oh, it gets better, Reed escapes a military installation called Area 57 and hides out in South America. So, in order to disguise himself, he reforms his face into….something else. It’s really, really bad. There are just way too many problems to ignore here.
Now, I had gone into the movie after reading and watching several reviews including that of Chris Stuckmann which you can see here. They had all reached the same conclusion: The movie sucks. I had read that there were some serious problems behind the scenes, even prior to filming. For one, Josh Trank was tapped to direct one of the planned Star Wars spin-offs. He ended up getting kicked off that particular project because they had gotten word of his “erratic” behavior on Fantastic 4. He took to isolating himself from everyone else and not wanting help from anyone. It was also reported that he pushed the actors to be as flat as possible. Why would he do something like that? There’s plenty of blame to go around, but I think that Josh Trank bit off more than he could chew with Fantastic 4, and it shows. Fox Studios is also to blame because they wanted to make a movie in a way that it didn’t really need to. There were a lot of elements in this movie that I did like and could’ve been made into a decent film. The problem is, is that you’ve got a director and a studio that were constantly butting heads, and it ended up showing on the screen. I may be coming down hard on this movie, and I have every right to, but at least I actually managed to sit through the whole thing, unlike Pixels.
It’s clear to me that Fox intended for this reboot to set up for another one. However, given the film’s budget of 155 million cash bucks, so far it only pulled in 26.2 million in three days. That effectively makes the film an official bust. The word on the street is that Fox Studios may end up taking a 60 million dollar loss on the project. That’s not an insignificant amount of money. Fox Studios is so blind that they are still pushing ahead with a sequel. They really don’t remember their history with The Fantastic 4. This is easily one of the worst comic book movies since Superman IV. I really wanted to like this movie. I wanted to be one of the few that would tell everybody else that they were wrong. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Fantastic 4 reboot is a colossal failure for Fox Studios and Josh Trank. The smartest thing that Fox can do right now, is to give the franchise back to Marvel/Disney. I’m giving this one a 4/10. This, Fox Studios and Josh Trank all get a dunce cap and are hereby sentenced to The Dunce Corner.