Less than Fantastic
Failed reboot delves way too much into origins instead of getting straight to ‘clobberin’ time’
A standard knock against blockbuster comic book movies is they sacrifice character development for action.
Be careful what you wish for. There are many things wrong with Fantastic Four, a failed reboot by Josh Trank, but the fatal flaw is that it squanders more time fashioning these familiar Marvel Comics heroes than it does motivating them.
And when it finally gets down to the business of saving the planet, it’s not “clobberin’ time,” to use the Fantastic phrase, it’s more like yawnin’ time.
The film blows nearly an hour of its plodding 100 minutes before conferring super powers upon the title team, played by Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell. The casting ranges from the bizarre (Teller) to the merely curious (all the rest).
A prologue set in 2007 shows Teller’s Reed Richards as a child brainiac, inventing a teleporting device with the help of his muscular pal, Jamie Bell’s Ben Grimm, whose family conveniently owns an auto scrapyard.
Jump ahead seven years, and they’re now teen nerds, showing their device at a science fair that intrigues Dr. Franklin Storm ( The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey) of the Baxter Institute, a secret place where Big Ideas seem to inevitably become military playthings.
Storm’s hot-rodding son Johnny (Jordan) and serioso adopted daughter Sue (Mara), will eventually fill out the Fantastic Four, following a drunken interdimensional romp by the kid scientists to a place that looks like a nightmare landscape painted by Van Gogh. (The rest of the film is 50 shades of blah.)
I say eventually, because neither Trank, whose debut Chronicle was a marvel of lo-fi sci-fi, nor his coscreenwriters Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, are in any rush to advance this origin story, which is always the least interesting aspect of any superhero movie.
We’re obliged to watch seemingly every twist of the nut and weld of the soldering iron as Reed builds the te- leporter that will trip to the fourth dimension and result in cosmic enhancements: elasticity for Reed, rock-hard strength for Ben, flashy fire for Johnny and invisible force fields for Sue.
All this was handled in a few swift pages of the original 1961 comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who later created the group’s chief nemesis, Dr. Doom, played in the film by a brooding Toby Kebbell. Will Dr. Doom advance his evil plan, whatever that is?
Will the Fantastic Four work as tools of the U.S. military, represented by a malevolent Tim Blake Nelson?
Nobody’s in a hurry to work things out, or even give this querulous quartet its name, and laughs are even scarcer than plot developments.
This isn’t the Fantastic Four as we know them. It’s just a fantastic bore.