Fantastic Four (2015)

Flame Off

I feel like this movie is going to take entirely more flack than it deserves. Yes. It is a mess. Yes. It does feel like two different movies that were thrown together at the last minute. Yes. The writing is bad, and the story amounts to big heap of nothing. That being said, there are far worse films that have been released in this genre (cough. cough. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2") that have set it back far worse than this movie will. If anything, Fox's reboot of "Fantastic Four" just (sort of) exists. "Fantastic Four" is roughly half of a movie. It is too short, and ends before any actual plot, or character development, has a chance to unfurl. It is a film stuck in neutral, trying to eek out an existence from what producers assume people want from comic book movies.

The excellent cast is wasted with characters who are all too singular in purpose, and lack any real depth, or emotion. It is hard to say that any of them gave a decent performance, because their characters look bored and mopey throughout the entirety of the run time. The action sequences were bland to the point of nearly putting the audience too sleep, and the film is so murky looking that you can't even find joy in the visual quality. There were a few giggles in the first thirty minutes or so, but you hit a transportation device building montage, and the whole project begins to sink.

About an hour into the movie they reach "Planet Zero", an alternate dimension... or planet... or something, and it goes from a somewhat intriguing idea to capture the adventurous nature of Jules Verne to... 80's style David Cronenberg? Except, like "The Fly", or "Videodrome", it lacks any substance, or social commentary. Then it just devolves into another convoluted plot about an evil Military Industrial Complex trying to use the team to fight foreign enemies. What we really have here is the downside of movies being made by committee. Everybody wants a slice of what Marvel has, and fanboys are clamoring for it, but nobody else has cracked the code quite yet. I guess we'll see what DC has to offer soon enough.

It was hard to watch this movie. It is hard to see one of the greatest group dynamics in comics get mistreated time and again on screen. This makes four bad movies based on one comic book property. This one, however, lacks the fun of the 2005 film, and the ambition of the 1994 original. That's right. This film had less ambition than the never-released catastrophe made the king-of-schlock, Roger Corman. We're talking about the man who made a film in less than two days. ON A DARE. Congrats Fox, that is the guy you had to do better than, and you failed. Miserably.

AND WHY WAS KATE MARA'S RESHOOT WIG SO INEXPLICABLY AWFUL?!

Grade: D
3D: N/A
Easter Egg: I left before the credits ended.

Starring: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan
Director: Josh Trank (Sort of)
Writer(s): Simon Kinberg & Jeremy Slater and Josh Trank
RT: 100 min
Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language