Fantastic Four: Movie Review
When a film like Josh Trank’s “Fantastic Four” is saddled with so much negative buzz due to production issues, including Trank’s troubles with the producers, it is hard not to have those thoughts running through your mind while watching the film. The plus side of the negativity is that it allowed me to go into “Fantastic Four” with low expectations. After all, you can’t be too disappointed if you don’t expect much.
Surprisingly, I actually got into the film at the start. I liked how the film treated the budding friendship of Reed Richards and Ben Grimm. Both of them had their issues at home and although Ben wasn’t the genius that Reed was, they worked well together. Ben (Michael B. Jordan) assisted Reed (Miles Teller) for years on a teleportation device that they built in Reed’s garage.
Even though Reed’s high school teacher wrote off the teleportation device as some sort of magic trick during the school science fair, that didn’t stop Dr. Storm (Reg E. Cathey) from offering Reed a full scholarship at the Baxter Institute in New York. Dr. Storm has been working on a similar device on a much larger scale and Reed had solved the missing piece to the puzzle. With the help of Sue Storm (Kate Mara), her brother Johnny and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebell), they build a teleportation device that can send humans to another dimension.
Unfortunately when the team goes to this dimension things go awry, leaving Victor for dead and the other team members physically altered with special abilities. Of course the government, especially Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson) wants to use the team for military means. They play along with the hopes of finding a cure.
“Fantastic Four” has many problems. The first is that even though the set up is easily when the film is at its best, it feels like 3/4 of the film is the set up. The second issue is that once the characters learn to use their abilities, they thrust into the final act. There seems to be no middle, just an extended beginning and a rushed ending. Don’t even get me started on some of the dialogue spewed here. I got the sense that Teller was embarrassed by some of the things that he had to say on camera.
How does the rebooted “Fantastic Four” compare to the 2005 and 2007 films from Tim Story? Well, it’s a tough call. Although those two films were campy and honestly not very good, they at least had a stories that flowed and were entertaining. With this new more grounded version by Josh Trank, it starts off pretty strong but then just goes absolutely nowhere interesting. The talent involved in the new version is more impressive but that just makes it all the more sad when the end result is a lackluster super hero flick. I wouldn’t be against seeing this cast come back for a sequel, as I believe with the right material and director, they can bring us something good, but if “Fantastic Four” bombs out, and I think it just might, I smell another reboot down the line.
By: Marc Ferman