Review of Fantastic Four (2015) by Matthew H — 14 May 2016

After this movie was universally panned, I held off watching it until it came to home video. The critics were right.

Yet another version of the Fantastic Four, while the early 2000s version wasn't bad, it never really caught on. Let's not talk about the 1990s version. Reed is a high school science wiz who catches the eye of a researcher who brings them in to work for them. The actors are way too old to be roughly high school/college age so that's the first knock. The actor who plays Reed Richards is also miscast as he feels more like a sidekick at best than the eventually leader. Michael B. Jordan is probably the best actor here and is barely used at all. Kate Mara lives up to her moniker as the Invisible Woman since you often forget about her as she is just sitting at computers most of the time. The Thing also just feels like a waste.

It doesn't help that they whole crew isn't brought together until about 1/3 of the way through, then they spend the next 1/3 wondering why they have super powers, then the next 1/3 battling the bad guy who just gets introduced in the last 20 minutes and they finally become a team with 5 seconds to go. It's horribly paced. It'd needed to combine the first two acts into one and make the third act longer.

There are elements of this movie that could have been good, it needed a better cast and the editing needed to be better. The villain was excellent, but he is only in the film for a few minutes. The dark tone works in spots, but I feel this franchise more than most is generally very cheery and family friendly and they went the dark and gritty which tonally didn't work like it should. A second installment might fix a lot of the issues, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in seeing it at this point barring another major reboot.