Fantastic Four review - all set up little payoff
The comic book movie you probably didn’t ask for is here, with a reboot of the Fantastic Four exactly 10 years after the first version hit cinemas.
Let’s go with the good things first. The cast is excellent. Miles Teller and Michael B Jordan are about to go meteoric and few people play a baddie as well as Toby Kebbell. Another asset is director Josh Trank whose alternative take on powers made Chronicle so intriguing.
The previous paragraph comes with a qualification – these elements are all great in on paper but that actual film takes almost every scrap of potential and whittles it down to nothing.
As 100 minutes Fantastic Four is one of the shorter comic book movies in recent memory and yet it still manages to feel drawn out. That’s because for three quarters of the running time almost nothing happens.
Sure we meet the characters and get to know them a little, teasing us ever onwards towards the event which will give them powers. We know its coming, the filmmakers knew it was coming and yet they make us wait almost half the film before letting us see what we want from a superhero movie – superheroes!
When those powers do finally arrive, we almost immediately get a narrative ellipsis which robs the audience of arguablty the most interesting portion of the narrative, the time when they’re getting used to be newly-formed freaks of nature. Instead we skip ahead to get to a poorly setup villain and one of the briefest final action set pieces I’ve ever seen in a blockbuster.
Fantastic Four is really, really dull. The characters have straight faced conversations about science and family while government types say vagule threatenting things. There isn’t a single consistently entertaining character or actor who looks like they’re having any fun. It’s all incredibly serious, despite being a film about a dude who can go on fire and another who can stretch his limbs in a terrifyingly creepy fashion.
To Trank’s credit he does manage to bring some artistry to a couple of sequences. The Four waking up for the first time with their powers is an extended sequence of fear and agony which feels like a moment from a much better film. The team is tortured by the changes happening in their bodies, aflame and stretched and turning to rock before their eyes. It’s dark and nasty and fulfils that David Cronenberg element the director has been mentioning in interviews for months.
Another standout is the scene when Doctor Doom shows up for the first time, heralded by some full on horror histrionics which I never expected to see in a Marvel movie. It’s pretty rough stuff but feels totally alien to the film which came before, not to mention being at odds with the limp and fleeting finale.
We may never know the true behind the scenes story of Fantastic Four and which scenes Trank managed to direct without interference from the studio but it’s obvious the 31 year old didn’t manage to bring a clear vision of the film to screen. With the filmmaker recently released from his duties on an upcoming Star Wars spin-off, it’s hard to know where the blame lies.
And it doesn’t really matter either. However this version of Fantastic Four was compromised the biggest issue really is that it fails to entertain. The drama is limited, the comedy almost non-existent and with a scant few minutes of action there’s simply no discernible personality and a serious lack of engaging content.
Fox will be hoping to kick off a new franchise here with a sequel already dated for June 2017, and that could still happen if the film makes its dollars in its opening week but they’ll want to learn some lessons if they really want to give this series a shot.
