Ror Reviews: FANTASTIC FOUR Is Not Quite As Bad As You've Heard
Josh Trank's Fantastic Four reboot hits theaters this weekend, and critics have not been kind - In fact, the movie currently holds a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Does it deserve such a sound pasting? Actually... not really. Click on for my take, which does include some SPOILERS...
Let's get one thing straight right from the off: Fantastic Four is not a good movie; it's actually a pretty bad one - but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its share of good, even great things going for it. We've all heard the rumors of BTS problems that plagued the production, but without knowing exactly what went down it's unfair to attribute any of that to what went wrong here. That being said, the glaringly obvious contrast between the engaging sci-fi superhero flick this starts off as and the laughable CGI clusterfu*ck it becomes, does suggest a bit of unwanted meddling somewhere along the line.
There's nothing particularly original about the first act - it's really just your typical superhero origin story - but the cast are all on form, and we are at least mostly invested in the characters... with the possible exception of Jamie Bell's Ben Grimm, who is in the movie for all of about 3 minutes. Plus, Trank makes their transformations seem genuinely frightening, and even injects a bit of body horror for good measure. It's after this when the movie jumps forward a year that The Thing things begin to go pear shaped.
There's something to be said for trying to dispense with the usual "coming to terms with the powers" stuff, but it's all just handled so poorly. When we should be seeing the team interact and build upon the relationships that were established before their accident, instead we get a bunch of painfully dull scenes featuring the individual characters jawing with Tim Blake Nelson's military asshole, who seems to be trying to beat the world record for obnoxiously chewing gum on camera.
Ah, but the worst is yet to come my dear CBMers.
Doctor Doom returns from Earth Zero, kills a bunch of people, the team follows him back to Earth Zero, spout a bunch of unbelievably cliched dialogue, "kill" him, come back to earth, spout a bunch of unbelievably cheesy, stupid dialogue. The end.
It's honestly, seriously that rushed and haphazard, with no emotional impact or engaging team dynamics whatsoever. If it turned out they fired Trank halfway through production and hired someone straight out of film school to complete the movie, along with a bunch of equally inexperienced editors, it wouldn't be surprising in the slightest. It's such a shame too, because this film had so much potential. The biggest casualty is probably Toby Kebbell as Victor Von Doom, who really makes for a fine bad guy - even when he returns looking rather silly as his supervillain alter-ego, he still gets a few badass (and surprisingly violent) scenes.
Bad? Sure. A complete disaster? No. A pretty good first 40 minutes or so, then you still get the feeling there's a much better movie struggling to break free from the somewhat tedious middle section, before just giving up and allowing the wretchedness to completely engulf the finale. A wasted cast, a wasted opportunity - but not a total write-off.
About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.