THE FANTASTIC BORE!
A dull plot, dreadful dialogue — and Billy Elliot as a walking pile of rock. Fantastic Four is the worst Marvel movie yet
Fantastic Four (12A) Verdict: Super dull
FANTASTIC Four begins quite promisingly, with a schoolboy standing up in front of his classmates and telling them about the science experiment he’s conducting in his garage. He’s trying to build a teleporter that will beam human beings from one location to another, like in Star Trek.
As you’d expect, his schoolmates laugh and his teacher tells him to stop fibbing, but one boy’s curiosity is piqued. This is Ben Grimm and the science nerd turns out to be reed richards, a brainiac to rival Albert Einstein.
They become friends and later, when reed builds his machine and the two of them volunteer as guinea pigs, they’re turned into The Thing (Jamie Bell) and Mister Fantastic (Miles Teller).
The trouble is, we have to wait for nearly an hour before this transformation takes place and, in the meantime, we’re treated to endless scenes of reed tinkering about in his laboratory — staring i nto a computer terminal, brandishing a welding torch and gazing longingly at Susan Storm (Kate Mara), his beautiful colleague.
Sir Tim Hunt’s alleged views about how distracting f emale scientists can be are r i ght on t he money, according to this film.
while most superhero movies would get these early parts of the narrative out of the way as quickly as possible so the action can begin, Fantastic Four gets bogged down in them and doesn’t give itself enough time to focus on the meat of the story.
SO THE he dramatic conflict with Doctor Doom (Toby Kebbell), when it finally arrives, feels perfunctory. it’s all build-up and no payoff, like a 100-minute trailer for a film that never materialises.
Another problem is that director Josh Trank (chronicle) doesn’t have any grasp of what makes this kind of film enjoyable. one moment the four protagonists are languishing in hospital beds, having just crawled out of reed’s teleporter, the next they’re rushing about, enjoying their superpowers.
where are the sequences in which they learn how to use their gifts? For some reason, Trank left those moments on the cutting-room floor and, instead, decided to include yet another scene in which Dr Franklin Storm (reg E. cathey) lectures ‘the kids’ on the importance of working together as a team, rather than fighting among themselves.
To add to the string of disappointments, Jamie Bell, who played the ballet enthusiast in Billy Elliot, is wasted as Ben Grimm. He trots along beside reed for the first 50 minutes like some faithful golden retriever, but has almost no lines and fails to register as a character.
Somehow, he manages to remain
bland and uninteresting even when he turns into a walking pile of rubble.
This isn’t Bell’s fault — he isn’t given anything to work with by the writers or director. Like so much else in this film, he’s simply thrown away.
Marvel Studios, which is responsible for The Avengers series and all the associated origin stories, had nothing to do with Fantastic Four, and that is a great shame. The witty dialogue and knowing humour of films l i ke Iron Man and Guardians Of The Galaxy is completely absent here.
EVEN Thor, the most earnest and literalminded of the Avengers, seems like a member of the Algonquin Round Table next to Reed and his sidekicks. It’s like a superhero movie made by the writers of Thomas The Tank engine.
To give you an example of just how leaden the dialogue is, take the moment when a doctor examines Susan Storm after her transformation.
There’s something a little odd about her, to put it mildly, because she keeps disappearing and reappearing — literally becoming invisible.
The doctor turns to her father, who is understandably a bit worried, and says matter- offactly: ‘She’s moving in and out of the visual spectrum.’
Oh right. That. Nothing to worry about then. It’s as if Susan is suffering from a minor bout of hay fever, rather than a medical condition that breaks all the known laws of physics. Where’s Doctor House when you need him?
Turning Marvel’s celebrated comic book series i nto an entertaining, action- packed summer blockbuster should be a piece of cake, but this is the fourth attempt and could be the worst of the lot.
That’s saying something, considering the first , by legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman, was so bad that it was never released.
If I owned the rights to these characters, I’d call it a day, but depressingly, there’s already a follow-up in the works.