[rating=1.00]
To call Fantastic Four a monumental piece of shit would be to give it too much credit. For better or for worse, a piece of shit (monumental or otherwise) is something tangible. You could, if you so desired, hold it in your hands and it is the result of a lot of hard work on behalf of your body. Whatever else you say about a piece of shit, at the very least seeing it means that your body is probably functioning to the best of its ability. That cannot be said of Fantastic Four; no, this is a work of pure and painful constipation—everyone involved seems to be straining to get something out, with no success, and anyone who hears about it feels sympathy and disgust.
I’d ask what Fox was thinking, but it’s painfully obvious. Their rights deal for these Marvel characters is contingent upon actually producing a movie and failure to do so results in the rights reverting back to Marvel’s sole control. Their first attempts at jumpstarting a franchise out of Fantastic Four failed miserably, producing two movies widely regarded not only as bad comic book movies but bad movies in general. While it would’ve been best for them to quit after the disaster of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I can’t really blame them for trying. Marvel, after all, has turned their cinematic universe into a multi-billion dollar a year industry so it makes sense why Fox would want to try to get a piece of that pie.
What’s clear, however, is that the studio has no idea how to make a pie of this magnitude. None. Zero. This attempt at a reboot will be studied for years, I imagine, as a case study both on how to derail a franchise before it leaves the station and the perils of making a movie based on characters you don’t understand. There’s so much wrong with it I don’t know where to start.
This is the second movie from director Josh Trank, who surprised us all with the phenomenal 2012 superhero deconstruction, Chronicle. It was a movie full of heart, full of brains, and full of fun. What’s clear now is that all of this probably came from writer Max Landis. Left mostly to his own devices here (though he had some script help with co-writers Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater) the script plods aimlessly, desperate to offer something new without straying too far from the morass of convention. Characters speak and act foolishly—disheartening, to say the least, considering they’re ostensibly our best and brightest minds.
Much has been made of the changes the film makes to the Fantastic Four origin story. This isn’t something I particularly mind, in and of itself. The whole astronauts transformed by space radiation angle is a relic of another time, and the desire to tweak the formula is understandable. Radiation from space is replaced with some unknown energy from a dimension that sits just beside our own. The potential was there to make this cool as hell, but it’s treated as an afterthought with no real explanation or reason. This lack of explanation, in fact, is a consistent running theme throughout Fantastic Four, making it feel as though this was a project abandoned mid-filming and then cobbled together from the pieces that they had.
This go around has the team recast as students working on a top secret project at the Baxter Institute, an elite university for the science minded. Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has spent his entire life—from the fifth grade onward, no joke—trying to perfect teleportation with his buddy Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) from the confines of his parents garage, a feat he accomplishes initially using Nintendo 64s (again, no joke) and some scrap metal. When Richards and Grimm unveil their project at a county science fair their senior year, it gets noticed by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Caffey) and his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara) despite the project being disqualified because…the judge doesn’t like Reed, or something? (It’s sort of ambiguous.) Turns out, using only spare parts and a garage, Richards and Grimm have solved a problem Storm’s elite team has not been able to crack. Richards is given a full scholarship to the Baxter Institute and Grimm is…not worthy or something? (Again, kind of ambiguous.) Working with disgraced genius Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) the team spends an agonizing 50% of the movie’s running time doing sciencey things, before an accident transforms them all into the Fantastic 4 and Dr. Doom, respectively.
By the time anything of any real consequence happens the movie is almost over. Fanboys will no doubt rage at the short screentime given to the legendary Dr. Doom, whose introduction is most notable for the fact that it signals the end. The third act and climax are all but non-existent; by the time the core problem is introduced, there’s only about 15 or 20 minutes left to endure.
I say endure because every second of this movie is worse than the last. Riddled with painful dialogue (“There is no Victor, there is only Doom”) and performances that couldn’t be more wooden if they came from the lumber yard, Fantastic Four meanders aimlessly through an hour and forty minutes of uninspired, unoriginal sewage without ever finding its purpose. Watching it was an excruciating exercise, like being forced to endure video footage of your best friend being viciously fired from a job they sincerely loved. “How can anyone recover from this,” I wondered throughout. The only potential that still remains with Fantastic Four is the potential to kill careers. Which is a shame because it’s so clearly not their fault.
But Hollywood is a fickle beast. In one day, out the next…isn’t that the way it goes? This is a movie so bad that it will haunt everyone involved from now into eternity. There are no excuses, no justifications. At some point during the movie’s production someone had to have realized how terrible the movie they were making was. Someone could have stopped production or blocked its release. Hell, it wouldn’t have been the first time a Fantastic Four movie was made and not released. Back in 1994, Roger Corman was hired to produce a low-budget adaptation of the comic book that never saw the light of day—and possibly was never supposed to, depending on whom you believe. The whole thing was done as an attempt to maintain the filming rights for a lucrative franchise. This is undoubtedly what Fox should have done this time. While they might have been assholes for going that direction, at least they would’ve saved themselves the embarrassment of releasing what can best be described as the cinematic equivalent of straining pointlessly on the toilet after a night of too much cheese.
Fantastic Four is in theaters now.
