The Gist
From an early age Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been obsessed with teleportation. While his teachers told him it was just a dream, he and his good friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) managed to create such a machine and present it at their High School science fair.
Here they found themselves spotted by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his science obsessed daughter Sue (Kate Mara) which results in Reed winning a scholarship to the elite Baxter Corporation. Soon Dr. Storm has Reed, Sue, the wayward Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and his rebellious son Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) all working on creating the world’s first teleportation device. Things however take a turn for the worst when the machine is finished and the teens realise that Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson) is going to take the glory for it. A drunken night of adventure takes them to a strange new land and leaves them in a state that means they will never be the same again.
The Review
Before you go to watch the reboot of Fantastic Four ask yourself this riddle. When is a Marvel film not a Marvel film? The answer? When the film only has the Marvel branding on it and is instead made by Twentieth Century Fox. Yes like X-Men and Spiderman the Fantastic Four is still a franchise that Marvel has not yet managed to wrangle back into the fold. There will be many of you out there thinking that this Fantastic Four can’t be as bad as the films that surfaced a decade ago after all Marvel even managed to make Guardians Of The Galaxy and Ant-Man into pretty decent movies. But don’t kid yourself because no-one that had anything to do with those films had anything to do with this film and at the end of the day this film is a kind of slap-in-the-face to Marvel from Twentieth Century Fox as this film’s mere existence means that Fox gets to hold onto the reigns of the Fantastic Four for a little bit longer.
As a film the new Fantastic Four feels like a film of two halves. The first half is a pretty decent origins story. Like so few comic book movies used to do the film allows some good characterization set-up of key characters like Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben. And then just as the audience find themselves liking these characters and ready to go on a journey with them director Josh Trank (who brought us the sci-fi gem Chronicle) loses complete control of the film.
It soon becomes dangerously apparent that the film spent way too much time on the earlier characterization so much time in fact that by time the Fantastic Four get their super powers both the director and screenwriting team realise that to avoid this turning into a three hour epic everything suddenly has to become rushed. Vital scenes that need to be there of the four learning about their abilities and new found powers are simply non-existent and suddenly all the dramatic moments from earlier in the film simply giveaway to some terrible clichés that make audiences groan or laugh… I mean how can you keep a straight face when the line ‘There is no more Victor here, just Doom’ is delivered?
You realise that something has gone horribly wrong with this film when you realise that a scene earlier on featuring the young Reed starting up his teleportation device for the first time has more dramatic tension and suspense than what the final battle scene has. In fact it almost feels like zero thought at all has been put into the finale. On one hand you have Doom who here is portrayed as a villain with very little substance and even the much used evil blue laser ray makes an appearance, it’s all very mundane to say the least. On reflection you realise that much of the first half of this film needed to be told in 15-20 minutes and the rest of this film needed to show the characters accepting there abilities, learning about them and then trying to keep the authorities away from them. In fact perhaps the whole Doom story needed to be thrown by the wayside and instead have the film focus on the fact that the Four need to try and escape the military who want to use them for ‘bad’ purposes.
Perhaps the most annoying part of Fantastic Four is that the second half of this film really feels like it is caging its actors. Any film lover at the moment will tell you that Miles Teller is one of the best young actors going around. Here early on Teller steals the show as he brings a real dramatic style to the way he portrays Reed. Yes he does the normal ‘I’m a geek nobody understands me’ shtick but he also brings a little more to it. In fact the scene where he wakes up and realises that his friends are all missing just goes to show how good the young actor is, but then throughout the second half of the film he is either absent or delivering the same weak lines the rest of the cast are reduced to. It seems strange that the film forgets about the character that early on the story was centered on.
The Verdict
Well Fantastic Four fans it seems like we are all going to have to wait a bit longer for a good film to surface in the franchise. This Fantastic Four reboot gets off to a great start but sadly peters out to a pretty lackluster finale that is just overloaded with clichés. Somewhere inside Fantastic Four is a good film with a decent storyline trying to break out but sadly Josh Trank lost control and sent it crashing into a wall.
Certificate: 12A
Director: Josh Trank
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell
Running Time: 100 mins
Release Date: 6th August 2015
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