Review: FANTASTIC FOUR

FANTASTIC FOUR  (ACTION/SCI-FI)
1 out of 4 stars
Directed by Josh Trank
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Castellaneta, Tim Heidecker, Owen Judge, Evan Hannemann, Mary Rachel Dudley
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language.
100 minutes
Verdict: A fantastic form of failure, FANTASTIC FOUR lets down a wonderful cast with a detached vision, a pedestrian screenplay and an utter lack of payoff culminating in the glaring absence of a third act.
YOU MAY ENJOY FANTASTIC FOUR IF YOU LIKED:
CHRONICLE  (2012)
FANTASTIC FOUR  (2005)
FANTASTIC 4: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER  (2007)
X-MEN  (2000)
DIVERGENT  (2014)

"In issue 141 of the Fantastic Four, published in November, 1973, Reed Richards had to use his anti-matter weapon on his own son, who Aannihilus has turn into the Human Atom Bomb. It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four, because they weren't like other superheroes. They were more like a family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die. And that's the paradox - the closer you're drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go."
-THE ICE STORM  (1997)

At the center of the Fantastic Four superhero team, one of Marvel Comics' most noteworthy series hailing back to the Silver Age of Comics, is a family dynamic.  They aggravate one another and yet each feel responsible for one another, and in spite of disagreements, they ultimately come together to work as a team.  In Tim Story's FANTASTIC FOUR, released in 2005, and its 2007 sequel, FANTASTIC 4: RISE OF SILVER SURFER, they were interpreted as flippantly goofy family comedy.  They were sitcoms.  The superhero family has worked before though, back in 2004 with Brad Bird's Disney/Pixar production of THE INCREDIBLES, one of the best superhero movies ever made, and which featured original characters whose team dynamic, even many of their individual traits, were comparable to the Fantastic Four.  With the bar set so low by Story's version, and a decade of advances made in superhero blockbusters, the new reboot, also titled FANTASTIC FOUR, didn't need to be as good as THE INCREDIBLES, but not only does the new film seem to lack a fundamental understanding of it characters, it lacks any motivation and a complete story.  Directed by Josh Trank, whose first film CHRONICLE was an original superhero hit in 2012, FANTASTIC FOUR is one of the most astoundingly misguided major movies in recent memory.  When the box office is dominated by mega-budgeted, generic brand name blockbusters that have been carefully shepherded through production under watchful studio eyes with vested interested in their $100+million investments to assure an audience-friendly, inoffensive product, FANTASTIC FOUR misfires in an incredibly unexpected way.  It's two-thirds of a bad movie, an ensemble movie where characters don't interact, collide or connect, and a superhero movie that forgets it has a villain right up until it's time for the climactic action.  The result is baffling.
Shy but sweet boy genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and her adrenaline junkie brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), gruff but loyal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a cyberpunk with a chip on his shoulder, are all part of a team working on a "Quantum Gate", a portal to open a pathway to a planet in a parallel dimension.  Learning that they will not be given the opportunity to experience the fruits of their labors by venturing onto "Planet Zero", they make their own unauthorized expedition, but it ends disastrously when the planet surface destabilizes.  Victor is left behind, presumed dead, while Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben only narrowly survive, but also transformed in their genetic makeup.  Reed's body now has enormous elasticity and can be reshaped at will.  Sue can make herself invisible and also create force fields, and Johnny can engulf his body in flames at will, which he can use to create projectile fireballs and fly.  The worst of it comes to Ben, not even a part of the official team, but brought on board as Reed's best friend.  He is made incredibly strong and virtually indestructible, but at the price of having his flesh transformed into rock.

The movie is a fair bit more interesting in the scenes prior to the Planet Zero expedition, when it's a loosely established and weird sci-fi drama.  This is an impressive cast, all of whom have done exceptional work in previous films and television; Teller, who starred in THE SPECTACULAR NOW in 2013 and WHIPLASH last year, gets to show a softer, sweeter side than we've seen before.  Although his character is thinly realized, Teller fairs better than his co-stars, with Mara, the under-appreciated highlight of House of Cards in its first season, and Jordan, one of the most talented and charismatic up-and-coming stars who gave a stellar performance in 2013's FRUITVALE STATION and will star in CREED later this year, are essentially non-characters.  Sue Storm is there to design the suits for the expedition, which isn't tied into any of her other two established character traits, those being an specialization in detecting patterns and a passion for music, the former which only comes into play once and is largely inconsequential.  Jordan gets the "doesn't play well with others" card, and his character is all but brushed aside in the latter half of the movie.  Even if the movie had been better overall, Bell is the only questionable casting choice, possibly chosen for his performance-capture experience as the title character in THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, as his character is CGI for the second half of the movie, but there's little that's actually intimidating about him.  He's more of an "angry little guy" type.  The CGI "Thing" is poorly designed too, and believe it or not, may provoke reconsideration of Story's heavily criticized practical makeup version played by Michael Chiklis.  Honestly, that looked a bit better. 

Kebbell is fine, but again, the character is poorly written, established with an unrequited interest in Sue, one that never comes into play in his motivations past his introduction.  When he returns late in the film as the Fantastic Four's arch-nemesis Dr. Doom, he looks cheap (an obvious but arguably overused comparison which applies here is that he looks like a Power Rangers villain) and use as a villain feels cheap, sudden and ill-conceived.
There are so many things wrong about FANTASTIC FOUR, in spite of its inherent potential, but at the dead center of it is a comprehensive lack of payoff.  From the early scenes of the film and then throughout, things are set up and... nothing.  In some sense, it feels like a great, bloated preview for something else, not because it's an origin story, but because after 94 minutes (not including credits) we've only seen a setup, and an initial conflict, a first and second acts, two patently detached parts of a three-part story structure.  Imagine if STAR WARS ended with Luke, Han and Leia escaping from the Death Star.  Imagine if the Lord of the Rings trilogy stopped after THE TWO TOWERS.  Imagine if those movies did that on top of being thinly written, off-pace and severely detached.  And it had such a cracking cast, too.

All images via 20th Century Fox