A Fantastic Bore
Directed by: Josh Trank
Written by: Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg, Josh Trank (screenplay) Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (comic)
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Reg E. Cathey, Toby Kebbell
The H-Bomb: For pretty much his entire childhood, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been working on a teleportation device, with the help of his classmate, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell). Reed’s teachers never took his project seriously, and after a pseudo-successful demonstration at his high school gets him disqualified from the science fair, he’s approached by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), who invites Reed to continue working on his device at his research institute. With the assistance of Storm’s children, Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and his dick-ish protege, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), Reed is able to construct a device large enough to teleport people to… well, destination unknown.
The plan, once said device is constructed, is to send trained astronauts through it. Well, Reed and the others aren’t too keen on that idea, so the night before, our five young scientists break into the lab, and after suiting up, Reed, Victor, Ben, and Johnny go through the teleportation machine, and find themselves in another dimension, dubbed Planet Zero. Before long, this place begins to react to their presence, as the ground cracks open and Victor falls into the green lava crap underneath. The others manage to teleport back home, but something goes very wrong with the machine, as Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Sue all soon discover that they have been changed… altered, in very strange ways, and now possess some very unnatural abilities.
Believe it or not, in those two paragraphs, I have described roughly two-thirds of the film’s plot. So I shall stop there.
What is with these movies with numbered titles? Earlier this week I covered The Ridiculous Six, which was pure garbage, and now I’m on to Fantastic Four, the highly anticipated but very poorly received Marvel reboot that has just hit DVD, and lo and behold, it’s every bit as terrible as The Ridiculous Six. I can only hope Tarantino will buck this trend with The Hateful Eight. But getting back to Fantastic Four… holy shit, how’s this for a novel concept: A comic book film in which… nothing happens! Literally fucking nothing… at least until the latter half of the final act.
Imagine, if you will, a comic book adaptation directed by Princess Coppola, that might give you some idea of how absolutely uneventful this movie is. Except, it wasn’t made by that blue blood Hollywood brat. Instead, this re-imagining of Marvel’s oldest team of superheroes comes to us from co-writer/director Josh Trank, who made a terrific debut with Chronicle a few years back, and who seemed like an ideal choice to give Fantastic Four a darker, grittier, more grounded-in-reality reboot. So, what in the flippety fuck happened, here?
According to Trank, around a year ago he had this amazing film, that the studio (20th Century Fox) then tampered with, re-shot chunks of, and re-cut to ribbons. It’s a horror story that anyone who reads up on the making of movies with any regularity has heard too many times, studio interference destroying a film. I don’t know how good Trank’s original version of this flick would have been, all I know is, Fantastic Four, in its current incarnation, is an uneventful, vaporous slog that gives new meaning to the word lackluster.
For nearly the entire first hour of this 99 minute movie, we are with Reed, Dr. Storm, and the others in this bland as hell research facility, as they test and build this inter-dimensional teleportation thing. Over half the movie is devoted to this, in which no action, or anything of any real note or significance, happens. I’d be more forgiving if any interesting character development had occurred, but we don’t even get that. In fact, the bulk of these characters are incredibly dull, with flat personalities, portrayed by actors who clearly couldn’t give a shit.
Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan have been on fire, lately. Teller was so incredible in last year’s Whiplash, and Jordan, just last month, set the screen ablaze in Creed. As the Human Torch, however, Jordan does not set the screen ablaze, he barely even gives off a spark. Both he and Teller have been stripped of all their natural charisma, and give utterly dead performances. It’s obvious neither one of them had their heart in this. As Sue, Mara is every bit as invisible as her character is supposed to be, and Bell is completely wasted as Dull Guy #4, who eventually becomes The Thing. Unlike The Avengers, or Guardians of Galaxy, or even X-Men, the members of this superhero squad are all horribly unwritten and have no chemistry whatsoever. By the end, we’re supposed to buy that they’re a team… sorry, I wasn’t feeling it.
The special effects are incredibly uneven, as some of the characters’ physical transformations are downright startling, they look so good. Planet Zero, on the other hand, looks like something ripped out of a PS2 game. Terrible green screen, terrible CGI… just terrible all around. The character effects on Dr. Doom, when he finally decides to grace the movie with his presence, are an absolute joke. His appearance is as underwhelming as his final confrontation with the Four.
And if there is a word to perfectly sum up Fantastic Four, that word would be underwhelming. Underwhelming, dreary, and dull beyond belief. The bulk of the picture features uninteresting characters tinkering around in a lab, under the false supposition that it’s building up to any kind of grand finale. By the time some actual excitement comes along, it’s too damn little, too damn late. And this snoozer was supposed to be a blockbuster and a franchise starter? I’ve seen Jim Jarmusch movies with more going on in them! Add to all that, a line of dialogue at the very end that is guaranteed to make you groan out loud, and what you’re left with is one devastating waste of a motion picture.
Josh Trank had all the resources in the world at his disposal, and he just disposed of all of them, until all he had left was 99 minutes of wasted potential. Much like The Amazing Spider-Man movies, this film was so preoccupied with setting things up for potential sequels, that it forgot to tell a story of it’s own. Long and short of it, this Fantastic Four is a fantastic bore.
