Fantastic Four

I’m really bummed that the Fantastic Four reboot flopped. They nailed the origin story and the cast was spot on, but the film’s inconsistency, especially towards the end, really dragged it down. Up until the final battle, I was pretty happy with how the story was unfolding. It even had a surprisingly dark tone at times, and I appreciated the attempt to take a different approach than previous films. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite come together. The final showdown with Doom was just a mess of digital chaos, and it hit me then how much potential had been wasted. That said, I don’t think Fantastic Four is a total disaster. I wasn’t bored and left the theater relatively satisfied, but watching it again at home made some of the flaws more glaring and harder to ignore. Plus, why is the movie barely over an hour and a half? We’ll probably never know what the film could’ve been without the creative conflicts between Fox and Josh Trank, but I believe it could have been a solid foundation for future installments. Some elements were really well done, but as a whole, it just didn’t work and that overshadows the good parts. If this had been a pilot episode for a TV series, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But as a big-budget blockbuster with a $120 million price tag, it just can’t hold up, especially with some effects looking more like TV quality. It’s a shame the potential was squandered. (05/04/2018)

This is a film with zero ambition and it has no idea whether it wants to be a party of geeks gifted with superpowers or a comic thriller about an unexpected gift from another dimension. It’s a dramaturgically-muddled mess in which nothing works, especially the foursome itself. The origins of the heroes are referenced through futile dialogue and with zero chemistry, so it’s pretty loose, although a few heads do surprisingly explode at the end. Trank has created a movie without a face, and I only half believe all the crying over Fox's intervention. It's clear that it was heavily edited, but if a group is called the Fantastic Four... (08/13/2015)

In this case, I really don't understand why they decided to start something anew here. Just so Johnny Storm can be black and the whole comic book family can be more politically correct? This is just a crazy mess, and besides, the whole film is a ridiculous construct, as if the creators were returning to the basics of comics but failed to realize it would just come off as awkward. (10/30/2015)

I don't like comic book films about heroes with superpowers because I consider them to be heavily infantile and their audience clearly belongs to a different age category than mine. But even within what comic books work with and strive for, Fantastic Four tragically fails. It amounts to sterile boredom, where all attempts at dramatic transcendence fail and where it lacks even what its genre colleagues possess, namely exciting action and plenty of special effects. The ratio of investment to result here is catastrophic. Overall impression: 10%. (02/04/2018)

I see wasted potential. Almost Cronenberg elements of Richards’ imprisonment, exploding heads, freakish mutations. Damn! We might have had something here. So we have a product here that the studio took away from the director, changed it (badly) into a kind of hybrid kids’ and adult movie which stops making sense in the second half, throwing the “popular" opening that took so much hard work into the trash. The actors is fine, the best of all being Michael B. Jordan’s hated human torch. He has a great time as Johnny. Teller is very fine in the role of the weird nerd and fear stricken scientist, but Mr. Fantastica is a long way away from the original character. Bell stays in the background, any action involving the Thing is cut ruthlessly and Kate Mara is a fox, but has terribly little room to perform. Toby Kebbell is super just occasionally, and as Doctor Killjoy (or whatever his name is) is extremely flat and what he does makes no sense = almost unexplained. For one of the most clever villains this is too little. I really don’t know what they thought they were doing, but the studio should have left the movie in Trank’s hands and tried it using his vision, whatever it was, and it would have been better than this mongrel (even scenes from the trailers are missing) that is saved from mediocrity only by one or two good ideas. (08/12/2015)