“Fantastic Four” is the worst superhero movie to be made in the last decade, everything about it is so lopsided and gangly I’m surprised anything in this movie actually makes sense.
Something that people don’t really seem to understand about the Fantastic Four is that they’re not really superheroes. Not in the same way the Avengers or the Justice League are, at any rate. They’re a family of explorers, intrigued by the call to adventure and the lure of scientific discovery. They just happen to have superpowers.
This hasn’t always been the case; nearly fifty years of history will have these characters doing all kinds of crazy things, but if you want to adapt the Fantastic Four into another medium, that’s the smartest starting point for it. This movie understands this, but like a tank being driven by a team of drunken Hitlers ramming through an orphanage of Jewish meerkats, its direction is sporadic at best and leaves everyone watching angry and confused.
This is a tough plot to explain because nothing really happens. A team of intelligent and bland young people build a machine that can travel to another dimension and once they get there, something goes wrong and they all get superpowers. Nothing happens for about an hour and then at the end of the movie, one of them decides to destroy the world using a giant beam of light he presumably got from the Giant Beam of Light Discount Store and Emporium. And he’s stopped. That’s it. Good guys win, bad guy loses. Sorry if that spoiled the movie for you, but you don’t need to see it anyway. That’s all there is, it’s a sloppy, uncoordinated origin to the Fantastic Four and then a disgusting version of Doctor Doom shows up at the end for ten minutes to inevitably lose and get turned into giant beam of light confetti.
The overarching problem with everything in this Fantastic Four movie is that it’s trying to be a Fantastic Four movie. There’s a movie somewhere underneath all the vomit about a group of quirky young scientists building a science portal to another dimension, being altered by their exposure to it, going through angst-ridden “oh woe is us” drama, and then getting gunned down by the police at the end like all dark sci-fi movies.
When things go right in this movie, when everybody wins at the end especially, it feels wrong. Everything they’ve set up and everything that happens in the first three quarters of this movie screams at me that this should all end in tears because this isn’t a superhero movie, this isn’t even a science-adventure movie. This is a hard, angsty, dark sci-fi movie that should end with all the main characters either dead or super dead. But they don’t because it’s trying to be something it’s not. This is like if at the end of “Prometheus” everyone lived, they all went back to Earth, and then decided to become superheroes. It doesn’t fit.
Even the bits and pieces don’t add up. I’m not one for harping on a movie for sketchy CGI work. It if works and it looks decent, I’ll give you a pass. In here, everything is disgusting or beyond fake. The Human Torch looks like burning garbage, the effects they have on that alternate dimension don’t look finished, and the Thing isn’t wearing pants for the entirety of this movie. That has nothing to do with the CG work on him, I admit, but it’s extremely distracting and all it does is make me think about his non-existent genitals. He might not have genitals, but he’s still an adult male, why isn’t he wearing pants?
The poor cast in this movie has nothing to work with from whatever scrap of used toilet paper they decided to use as a script. Miles Teller has the vague characteristics of Mister Fantastic from the comics nailed down, but he doesn’t have the charismatic drive or even a hint of being a believable leader. There’s even a small plot point during the movie that sees Reed escape from the facility for a year and then return as if nothing happened. Nothing comes from this and all it did was convince me that this version of Reed Richards is the human equivalent of a sewer mattress.
Jamie Bell nails the horror, confusion, and depression of being a giant rock monster with no genitals, but that isn’t what the Thing is all about. Yes, there’s sadness at his core, but like Spider-Man he’s a guy who moves past it. He doesn’t let it control his life. Ben Grimm takes a rotten situation and turns it around. There’s none of that here. There’s a sense that he’s getting that way by the end, but it does nothing to justify an entire movie spent moping like an abandoned pet rock and murdering dozens of people.
You don’t get to see it, but they definitely want you to know that the Thing spends a good year going on missions for the U.S. government killing dozens of people. Because everyone loves superheroes who are murderous government puppets? But the worst part about the Thing in this movie is the fact that his iconic catchphrase has its roots in Ben’s abusive older brother who would say “It’s clobbering time!” before beating the hell out of him as a kid. This this gives me the feeling the people who produced this turd respect the source material in much the same way Donald Trump respects minorities.
Michael B. Jordan probably does the best job portraying his character out of the main four. He’d be a fantastic Human Torch in a better movie, but here they saddle him with daddy issues and an unquestionable thirst to be a government puppet. These are characteristics that would be boring and deplorable in any other character, but for the Human Torch they’re sickening. Jordan, like the rest of the cast, has a lot of charisma and talent, but here he’s wasted on a movie that just doesn’t care.
When I say Kate Mara has nothing to work with when she’s portraying the Invisible Woman, I mean she has literally nothing to work with. She’s a cipher in this movie, an empty role that fulfils no purpose. Even Jessica Alba’s portrayal of the character was so misguided there was something to be gained by dissecting how bad it was. In this movie, she’s just as lifeless and empty as the rest of the cast so there’s nothing even to get mad about. Except for how she doesn’t to get through the portal with the rest of the boys and only acquires her powers by their ship coming back to Earth. That is so profoundly wrong, disrespectful, and downright idiotic that it makes my brain want to jump out of my skull and into a ditch filled with salt and knives just so something can numb the pain.
As far as I’m concerned, Doctor Doom isn’t in this movie. There’s a guy called Victor Von Doom in the beginning who is from the dark sci-fi movie I was talking about earlier, and then he dies, but at the end he comes back as a tin-foil crash test dummy who wants to destroy the world.
I don’t understand why film-makers keep trying to shoehorn Doctor Doom into the origin of the Fantastic Four. Yes, he’s their arch-nemesis, but trying to put him into their origin doesn’t work and it will never work. They’ve tried tree times now to make it work and at this point it makes more sense for him to be a scientist dictator wizard with a metal fetish like in the comics than any of the origins they’ve given him in the movies.
You want to know what the funny thing is? I don’t blame anyone involved in the making of this movie. I don’t blame the egotistical, talentless hack director who made it and eventually lost control of it, I don’t blame the bored actors trying to make this ship fly, I don’t blame the over-worked production crew, and I don’t even blame Twentieth Century Fox for being what they are.
After all, you can’t really blame a rabid wolf for massacring a sheep. That’s all they know. And like the rabid wolf, all Twentieth Century Fox knows is how to act like an arrogant child, refusing to let Marvel have their toys back and not only giving them the finger in the process, but giving the finger to audiences worldwide that just wants a good movie and not something that’ll give them bird flu.
