Review of Fantastic Four (2015) by Jack F — 24 Jun 2017

Yikes.

This is one royal mess of a film. The problems have been well-documented since its release, with director Josh Trank blaming changes made by the studio. However, my guess is it runs deeper than that as this one seems to be flawed on a basic story level. Simply put, "Fantastic Four" is one of the least enjoyable comic book movies I've ever seen. It's not even remotely fun, and I suspect that this was (at least party) by design.

To me, this comes off as another attempt to add a real-world dose of grit to characters in which this shouldn't be applied. There's something that's just kind of inherently silly about the Fantastic Four, and I'm just not sure how seriously we're supposed to take a story in which one character becomes a human rubber band. I haven't seen the previous "Fantastic Four" films directed by Tim Story, but from what I understand, for all their flaws, they at least understood that. There's a goofy sense of comic book-inspired fun underlying the proceedings.

With this reboot, I'm not even entirely certain the filmmakers set out to make a comic book film at all; it has more of a dark, sci-fi vibe to it, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But if you're going to participate in a bit of genre mashing, you better know what you're doing. There's not even a perfunctory explanation as to how Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Sue Storm (Kate Mara), and her brother, Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) acquired their special powers. They just briefly travel into a dank, ugly dimension and something comes out of the ground there and that's it. And I have absolutely no idea what happens in the climax, when the four of them square off against Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel).

Please understand, I'm not looking for real-life science accuracy here, or even pseudo-accuracy. You might recall how I similarly wasn't quite certain as to what was going on during the climax of "Thor: The Dark World" either. But in that movie, it didn't bother me because at least it was crazy and entertaining, and the rest of the movie had been fun leading up to that too.

But in "Fantastic Four," there's no sense of fun whatsoever. The four "heroes" barely even use their superpowers. They don't fight bad guys, they don't save innocent civilians, and the only time they even get to work as a unit is in their final confrontation with Doom. They spend more time under observation in a laboratory than they do out in the world doing superhero stuff. You can try and explain this away as its an origin story and therefore they had to get expository stuff out of the way first, but I'll still call bullshit as any other origin story will still feature the hero learning to use his/her powers by stopping evildoers. I didn't turn on a movie entitled "Fantastic Four" to watch four super-powered people not do fantastic things.

So we then roll back around to my earlier thought, which is that this isn't supposed to be a superhero movie. Fine. Maybe it's not. But it's still poorly written, no matter what genre it's supposed to be. There's the problems I mentioned earlier regarding the movie barely touching on some of its science. But it goes deeper than that. After they receive their powers, a rift develops between Richards and Grimm, with the latter holding the former responsible for what happened to them. This rift is never resolved, and by the end of the movie, suddenly it seems like they're cool again. What exactly happened there?

Remember how, after the lukewarm reception to "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," Sony decided to essentially share the character with Marvel Studios in the hopes of bringing him back to his former glory? I think that's something that 20th Century Fox should consider with the Fantastic Four. One thing I'm confident of: there's no way in hell Marvel would muck up one of their properties in this way. This "Fantastic Four" might as well be a DC film, in both tone and quality. Very, very non-fantastic.