Fantastic Four review: “Fantastically average…”

Fantastic Four review: Great independent storytelling in the middle, topped with corporate icing that makes you feel sick when you’re done with it.

From the director of the brilliant, inventive Chronicle, the producers of X-Men and Mark Millar (Kick-Ass, Kingsman: The Secret Service), on board as creative consultant, comes Fantastic Four, a reboot of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s comic book series that started all of the way back in 1961. With that amount of creative talent on board, we’re in for something quite special… right? Unfortunately not.

I’ve heard the words ‘best super-hero movie of the year,’ and some other really quite positive things said about Josh Trank‘s Fantastic Four over the past few days. I’ve also heard some quite negative stuff said about his movie, one which the distributors failed to show international critics until the last-minute on its week of release – which never bodes well for a big picture like this. Still, we always keep an open mind to these things and judge the film on its own merits, completely discarding torrid buzz prior to release, or indeed any other opinion at all. Before we share our own completely, let’s recap the story.

There will be some minor spoilers ahead.

Teenager Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a bit of a child genius, and when attending a high school science fair with friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Richards meets Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Susan (Kate Mara). The two become interested in his ground-breaking teleportation project that not only can transport objects to another dimension; it can also bring them back. Signing him up to the corporate Baxter Corporation, headed up by Tim Blake Nelson‘s Dr. Allen, Richards and Sue Storm are teamed up with her brother Johnny (in this Sue Storm is adopted), and reluctant genius Victor Von Doom, played by the always marvelous Toby Kebbell. When the group choose to transport themselves to the ominous ‘Planet Zero’ using their new life-sized “Quantum Gate,” pulling in Richards’ former classmate Grimm as he was there at its inception, it all goes horribly wrong, and all are physically changed forever.

We’ll leave our rather detailed synopsis recap there, as that takes us up to at least a third of the way into this, another Marvel origin story. Trank takes his time to get things going and when he finally gets to where it needs to be, he jumps massively forward in time. It’s true that the first third, or even two-thirds of this story are the most interesting. We’ll rather wrongly compare this to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (forgive us), so much as so that it’s not the where we need to get to being the interesting part of this story, but the build-up to it. We want to know how these people came to get these powers, and how they’re developed, rather than jump forward to see what happens a year down the line. When the inevitable does happen, I actually lost interest and, dare I say it, the part where Kebbell’s character is re-introduced, is the point where I turned off.

I don’t think that Fantastic Four is actually a bad movie – if you simply concentrate on the first two-thirds, but shoddy CGI, which is unacceptable in this day and age, rushed story arcs and seemingly destructive disposal of key characters on a whim, spoiled it all for me. The film enters the realms of cheese towards the end clearly displaying attempts to set things up for that already announced sequel. This needed to take its time in getting the origins developed enough before it started to get onto the other stuff, something it chooses not to do. It actually reminded me a lot of Marc Webb‘s first ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ movie; a film where at least the first half was decent, before ruining it all in the second – and we all know what happened with that series.

I suppose, to sum it all up, Fantastic Four could have been much more. At risk of repeating myself, it needed the origin to be stretched out a lot more, and be done with the second half tosh that felt rushed, and ultimately ruined the movie. It’s feels like a massive cake –  great independent storytelling in the middle, topped with corporate icing that ultimately makes you feel sick when you’re done with it… and I am done with it. I’m full. I don’t want any more.

Must do better. A lot, lot better.