20th Century Fox should have renamed this film Fantastic Four: Prologue because that is what is if we’re being honest. It’s half of a much better film stretched over a 100 minute runtime, and like all bad films that set up future installments, it doesn’t earn the right to sequel-bait. Removing all humor, emotion, and thrills, Fantastic Four ends up being the most mundane comic book movie in recent memory, and completely misses the point of the source material it has very little relation with. The film is a bland, tedious mess for the majority of its runtime until it crashes and burns entirely in an absolutely horrendous third act. There may be a talented cast and intriguing concepts bubbling below the surface, but Fantastic Four fails miserably at servicing those aspects and further tarnishes the brand that was responsible for making Marvel Comics what it is today.
Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) have created a machine capable of sending objects to another dimension. This gets the attention of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), who is also working on a similar project. He enlists Reed to work alongside his children Susan Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and their co-worker Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Instead of letting NASA be the first ones to cross dimensions and take the credit for their work after a breakthrough, Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Victor, with the assistance of Sue, take the transporter for a joyride and make their mark on history. But exposure to radiation alters their DNA is shocking ways and changes their lives forever.
If the Fantastic Four comics are about a group of people who undergo physical changes, and grow stronger as a family unit as a result, then the Fantastic Four movie is about none of that. The family aspect from this film practically nonexistent. Teller, Mara, Jordan, and Bell do the best they can with what they have, but as good as they are, they can’t cover up their glaring lack of comradery. We are told Sue and Johnny are siblings, but if it wasn’t for the film constantly reminding (and the 50+ years of comic history), we would have never guessed. Sue and Ben don’t even exchange a single line of dialogue. The film just overgeneralizes the relationship between these characters to the point where you never believe these people saw each other as family and would go to the ends of the Earth for one another.
Without addressing the film’s many rumored production troubles, there are echos of what director/co-writer Josh Trank intended for the film. In the film’s attempt to liken itself to a body horror film ala The Fly, the team’s superpowers are portrayed not as gifts, but a sickness out of nightmares. The scenes involving the characters getting their powers is genuinely horrifying and disturbing. Even though the film has hardly done a good job developing these characters, we still feel for them when they feel trapped, scared, and helpless in their own bodies. It’s a shame the film doesn’t follow through with the emotional fallout of this tragedy because it cuts to one year afterwards where the team has already mastered their powers. The movie can act on a specific moment, but it fails to invest all the way.
After sifting through a shallow, humdrum story for the first two thirds of the movie, Victor randomly comes back into the picture and from there, film goes from being a joyless bore to being idiotic comic book schlock. Dr. Doom can be an amazing villain if done right, but his cheap design, cliché dialogue, and his out-of-the-blue desire to the destroy Earth without any motivation makes him one of the worst villains to ever appear in a superhero movie; rivaling Jaime Foxx’s Electro and Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy.
The final battle, like the 2005 film, is ridiculously brief. Earth may be in peril, but the stakes never feel high enough to care about anything happening. Dr. Doom actually succeeding in his plan would’ve made for a much better climax. Instead, we’re left with an action sequence (the only one in the film, by the way) that feels like it was shot on a soundstage due to how disconnected it is from everything else. The dodgy CG and cheesy 60’s comic book dialogue isn’t just appalling to look and hear, but it’s completely incongruent with the dreary, super-serious film that became before. This is yet another superhero film that confuses dourness for realism. The embarrassment of the source material drains the picture of any spirit it could have had. If this is what Fox has in mind for the franchise going forward, I would rather never see another Fantastic Four movie again than be bored to tears by the overwhelming bleakness of it all.
Whether Trank was the wrong choice for directing or Fox meddled with his vision doesn’t matter anymore. This is a film where nobody, not even the audience, will walk away unscathed. The cast and crew will forever have this as a black mark on their résumés and audiences around the world will feel cheated out of their money. Fanastic Four is a bad film, but the worst part is that it will make people question whether or not the original comics were any good to begin with.
Final Rating: 2 out of 10.