Review: FANTASTIC FOUR is a Marvel Movie with none of Marvel's Tried-and-True Charms
By: Matt Tamanini Aug. 07, 2015
Pop quiz hotshot: what do you get when you take a Marvel movie and remove the fun, action, compelling characters, emotional stakes, and everything else that makes it recognizable as a Marvel movie?
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Time's up. Did you say FANTASTIC FOUR? If so, congratulations, you can skip this impossibly useless film and wait until February's release of DEADPOOL. If you didn't come up with the correct answer, your punishment is to watch this movie and all pre-WINTER SOLDIER episodes of MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. on repeat until all character rights revert back to Disney and Marvel Studios.
Was that too harsh? I feel like that might have been too harsh. Let me put this into context; FANTASTIC FOUR is easily the worst Marvel movie since 2008's PUNISHER: WAR ZONE. While that sounds pretty severe (and it is), remember that Marvel films, whether produced by Disney, Columbia, or Fox, have done pretty well over the last decade and a half; and it is that success that makes this unmitigated failure so much more disappointing. What should have been an exciting new entry point to one of the most storied teams in comic history is reduced to a mind-numbingly tedious example of how not to make a superhero movie.
?Director Josh Trank assembled a team of young, up-and-coming stars to lead this reboot, just eight years after FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER; another less-than-stellar chapter in Marvel cinematic history. In this new film, Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis are replaced by Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell. The four well-respected actors, all 32 years of age or younger, should have been the perfect foundation upon which to build another monster franchise, like 20th Century Fox's other Marvel property, the X-Men. While none of these actors, save perhaps Jordan, scream superhero, their combined talents, in the hands of a steady director, should have been able to jump start an underused comic book franchise.
However, the casting ended up being Trank's last decent decision in the film's production, for which he also served as a co-writer. In just his second feature film, the 31-year-old director decided to go completely against every lesson ever learned from successful comic book adaptations, and create the most boring film that I was at one point excited to see since Gus Van Sant's GERRY.
Normally at this point in a review, I would give a vague, spoiler-free synopsis of the movie's action; however, since this film is nearly all superfluous exposition until the last 25 minutes, this could get tiresome, but I will try anyway. While in fifth grade, pre-pubescent super-genius Reed Richards and his best friend Ben Grimm somehow build a machine capable of transporting matter back and forth to an alternate universe. Years later at a high school science fair, where Reed and Ben (Teller and Bell) still haven't perfected their machine, the father and daughter team of Franklin (Reg E. Cathey) and Sue Storm (Mara) give Reed a scholarship to the prestigious Baxter Foundation. While there, Franklin brings his rebellious son Johnny (Jordan) and erstwhile protégé Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) to help Reed and Sue build a Quantum Gate to Planet Zero.
Lo and behold, they are successful, and rather than being footnotes in history and letting others grab the glory, Reed, Johnny, Victor, and Ben decide to covertly become the first humans to step foot on Planet Zero. Unsurprisingly, this goes terribly wrong. Victor falls off the side of a cliff as the other three scramble to get back to Earth. However, Planet Zero's Kryptonite-green lava gives them, and Sue whom is trying to bring them back, unstable superhuman powers. Reed becomes a human version of Stretch Armstrong; Ben becomes a mammoth rock-man; Johnny becomes engulfed in flames, and Sue keeps fluctuating between visibility and invisibility.
After returning, the four are locked deep inside the Baxter Building and experimented upon, until Reed uses his ?new elasticity to escape, leaving his friends behind for over a year, which turns the three remaining team members against him. While I was mostly just bored up until this point in the movie, this is when I began to get angry. I am no Fantastic Four historian, and I have no qualms with a director taking liberties with comic book characters in order to tell compelling, modern stories; but if you are going to do that, it better make sense within the confines of the story which you are telling. This "conflict" was so forced and inauthentic that it made me actually consider leaving. To this point, Reed is shown to be incredibly loyal to Ben, and to have extremely strong bonds with both Johnny and Sue, with whom he has shared the first sparks of young love. Despite their flimsy rationalizations, nothing in Reed's character would give you any reason to believe that he would run away and abandon his friends in such a desperate situation.
Needless to say, some other stuff happens, they go back to Planet Zero, Victor is still alive, and after 75 minutes of a 100 minute movie, we finally get a villain and something that couldn't have been addressed in the film's opening half an hour. The newly rechristened Doom, hyped up on Planet Zero's interconnected energy lava, is hell-bent on destroying Earth, so that his new home planet will be free from our world's destructive nature. I will leave it at that, so that I don't ruin the only semi-intriguing two dozen minutes of the movie.
What is so disappointing about FANTASTIC FOUR is that it ignores every tried-and-true Marvel movie lesson. Nearly all superhero films have some element of science involved. Good superhero films gloss over the details, throw together some polysyllabic words, and move on. This one does not.
Many superhero movies involve technology and engineering. Successful superhero movies show the requisite building in a montage with an intense percussion score underneath. This one does not.
When telling origin stories, successful superhero movies focus on a journey wrought with real, human emotion and conflict. This one shows a bunch of kids sitting at computers for the better part of an hour and a half.
Other than a bright blue tower of light shooting down to Earth from the sky (which has become Marvel standard issue as of late), there is very little in FANTASTIC FOUR that resembles a successful superhero movie. Trank and his co-writers spent so much time world-building, that they forgot that the first job of a filmmaker is to populate your world with characters that the audience will care about.
Studios rarely miss on Marvel movies, but after the two recent AMAZING SPIDER-MAN films (Columbia) and this pile of dreck (Fox), it might be time to turn all of the kingdom's keys over to Disney.
Check out the trailer below:
FANTASTIC FOUR starring Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Tim Blake Nelson, Reg E. Cathey, and more is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence and language.
Did you find anything redemptive in the abysmal FANTASTIC FOUR? Let me know what you think in the comments below, or on Twitter @BWWMatt. Also, make sure to follow @BWWMoviesWorld on Twitter for all of the biggest news from the world of movies.
Photo and Video Credit: 20th Century Fox
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