‘Fantastic Four’ is a fantastic fail
Fans of Fantastic Four comics might remember the Frightful Four, a supervillain group with members like Paste-Pot Pete and Dragon Man.
As lame as they were, those dudes probably would have made for a much better movie than Fantastic
Four, an unfortunate movie that does an embarrassing disservice to the decadesold property and is a frightful waste of all the talent involved.
Early on, however, director Josh Trank (who co-wrote the script with Jeremy Slater and producer Simon Kinberg) shows signs of how good this movie could have been. Fantastic Four begins with young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) futzing around with science way too advanced for a kid. Quirky but with a good heart, he’s understood by no one except for his best buddy, Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann).
Fast-forward to when both are teenagers and Reed (Miles Teller) has made a breakthrough in teleportation science and the key to entering another universe. He’s recruited to a science foundation to work on a bigger version of the thing he has been developing since he was a kid with brainy Sue Storm (Kate Mara), her hotheaded gear-head brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and antisocial Latverian scientist Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell).
The government steps in and wants to send its own guys to this new primordial world — dubbed planet “Zero” — but instead Reed recruits buddy Ben (Jamie Bell), Johnny and Victor to take a drunken trip there first.
It’s here where the film falls off the rails, moving into B-movie disaster. Each of the guys is endowed with tremendous abilities — as is Sue, who gets blasted during their return to Earth — and the good guys get over hard feelings and disagreements just in time to deal with Victor, a once jerky genius and now jerky supervillain who looks as if he just walked out of an old episode of
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
As a human torch, Jordan is the lone highlight, doing his best with the silliness at hand — the dialogue is often laughable, including Kebbell’s egregiously bad line “There is no more Victor, only Doom.”
Teller, devoid of the charisma he showed last year in Whiplash, is Mr. Fantastically Bland as the super-stretching Reed and has no chemistry with equally wooden Mara. Her character has impressive invisibility powers but seems to exist just to drive everyone around in a force-field bubble. The special effects are iffy, although Bell’s CGI rock creature, the Thing, does look cool. This third try at a Fantastic
Four movie franchise is the worst yet. At least Roger Corman’s unreleased film in the 1990s and Tim Story’s two efforts in the mid-2000s embraced the heroes’ campy roots and family dysfunction. Trank’s darker, Nolan-esque version loses the dynamic that has made this superhero crew beloved since 1961.
If you want a good Fantastic Four flick, watch Pixar’s The In
credibles. This one is just fantastically poor.