Fantastic Four is a terrible movie. A compelling cast of young actors is squandered in something of an anti-superhero, superhero movie that tediously fights any urge to give in to genre trappings until the end when it finally throws in the towel and shoots a blue beam into the sky as a half-assed villain threatens the Earth. Thing is, the audience threw in the towel long before any third act shenanigans take place.
Thirty minutes into this 100-minute snooze you know you’re in trouble. We’re briefly introduced to Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) as fifth graders where we learn Richards is a child prodigy that has developed a crude teleportation device. Flash-forward seven years later and we see the actors, both of which are in their late twenties, playing high school seniors. Richards has nearly perfected his teleportation device given what tools he has at hand, capturing the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter, Sue Storm (Kate Mara), who just so happen to be working on the exact same thing. Go figure!
Dr. Storm runs some sort of scientific school for gifted children, has an intelligent, outcast son named Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and hires (or is it enrolls?) Reed right out of high school to help him, Sue, Johnny and the ominously named Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) create a full-size version of Reed’s teleportation device, which has opened the possibility of traveling to a computer generated planet in another dimension in hopes of finding a new energy source. Because, as we’re told time and again, The Earth is dying! It’s not worth saving! We’re all terrible people!
We get hints Victor is crushing on Sue all while he stares and glares at Tim Blake Nelson, the man with the money that can’t be trusted. We also hear a story of Victor “burning down the servers” in the past and are first introduced to him, alone in a darkened apartment. Oh my, he’s so ominous! But not really. Other than Victor’s name and Sue’s throwaway “Listen to Dr. Doom” line, Victor is fine. Perhaps a little eccentric, but otherwise he’s fine. In fact, this film really has no villain, and, to be honest, a movie doesn’t necessarily need a villain, but it needs something and that something can’t feel like it’s a plot device that was made up just so we could have a big, CG battle in the film’s final third.
Even worse, director Josh Trank (Chronicle), working from a script he co-wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater and accidentally forgot to burn before turning it in for approval, gives us only hints of characters — all painfully underdeveloped, some more than others — and does nothing to create actual relationships.
Reed’s best friend is Ben, but we really only see them together as kids. In fact, Jamie Bell lucked out. He’s only in this movie for about five minutes before he turns into a CG rock monster. Johnny is a loose cannon, angry at his dad for being more interested in his work than he is in him, but seems to have a good relationship with Sue. As for Sue, well, she listens to music because she likes to find patterns in things. Seriously, that’s her character trait and it comes back into play later in the film. I’ve already told you about Victor, the guy the film basically turns into a sacrificial villain because they had nowhere else to turn.
All the charisma and wit Teller and Jordan have brought to their films in the past is lost here. Teller is a passive geek and Jordan plays the scorned son one second, than the good brother and friend another, before finally playing the scorned son again that’s having passive aggressive fun with his new found flaming powers. I can understand glossing over the science of it all, because it’s all rather stupid, but at least pay enough attention to your characters so there’s some understandable consistency and would it hurt to have just a little bit of fun? This movie is a zero on the entertainment level. No one is having fun, not the characters and certainly not the audience.
Yes, the film eventually finds Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny and Victor getting fantastical powers in the most ridiculous of ways. Sue turns invisible, Ben turns into a rock man, Reed gets stretchy, Johnny starts on fire and Victor, well, his transformation is probably best left unsaid as it’s really the only secret this film has… that and none of it can really be explained. Sort of how the special effects in this film are some of the worst you’ll see in a blockbuster this year or any recent year. And not because they’re not always believable, but primarily because they are so lazy.
A large portion of the film’s third act takes place on the planet from another dimension, a planet made of nothing but rock and glowing green ooze, or something like an ooze… I don’t know, it’s sort of cloudy, but… not? It looks unfinished, as do several of the scenes featuring Johnny Storm as he flies around on fire. One scene in particular, where he takes out a drone, is about as half-assed as I’ve seen in a film in some time, then there’s the moment Ben Grimm is attempting to shut his teleporter door and being pummeled with foam rubber rocks, which look as if they are just being shoveled on him by crew members just off camera.
By the time the film is over we see our titular heroes looking on at their new science labs and Reed says to the others, “We need a name.” Obviously we know what the name is and the film was oh-so-clever in not revealing it before the movie began, saving it for the end as Fox has already dated Fantastic Four 2 (a date they will have to cancel if they have any measure of self-respect) and will pretend they have a new and viable franchise on their hands. The scene plays forever, like pretty much every other aspect of this film. Delaying the inevitable and in ways you almost feel sorry for the group of actors forced to utter such tedious lines as if we find it charming or at all suspenseful. Spoiler… we don’t.
