Cast: Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan are two of my favorites right now. Kate Mara was good in House of Cards before it jumped the train. Jamie Bell was good as Billy Elliot years ago. Reg E. Cathey is also good in limited use on House of Cards. Tony Kebbell was excellent as Koba in last year's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Plot: Teen prodigy Reed Richards (Teller) gets a job with the Baxter research facility where he works with adopted siblings Johhny (Jordan) and Sue Storm (Mara) and reluctant teammate Victor Von Doom (Kebbell). They are working on a device that teleports to another dimension. One day, there's an accident involving them and Richards' childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Bell) that leaves them all with different powers and Victor behind in the other dimension. When they finally bring Victor back, things do not go well.
Thoughts:
I badly wanted to be the person to find the way to look at this movie favorably. After all, the cast proves that Fox was trying and Josh Trank, director of Chronicle, has proven that he has a different perspective on superheroes. On a more general level, when people are so ready to pile on to a movie, it's normally an overreaction.
There's no saving this movie though.
This relies heavily on superhero shorthand. Every character is the broadest of archetypes and the refusal to inject this with any humor makes that hard to swallow. If you ever had trouble understanding what "plot-driven" means, watch this, because every beat of the movie is to force the plot along. Character decisions drive little or nothing. I'd even wager that anyone not familiar with the comic characters would be baffled by every beat of this story.
I'm not sure how you ruin this cast, but I have some ideas how they did it. First, the average age of the four actors is 29 (probably 28 when filming). Reed and Ben are maybe 18 and the others aren't much older. I don't know why they chose to do that. Nothing about that makes sense. They act much older the whole time and they are leading a major project with large teams of scientists and technicians. For god's sake, the flashback to a young Reed looks more like 1997 than 2007 (notice the shelf of N64's powering his prototype). Second, by making this a complete origin story there's too much to cover. It has to introduce each of the Four individually, show them coming together as a team (pre-powers), develop rivalries, get their powers, adapt to having the powers, have a fall out, come back together, and beat the bad guy. There's so much plot to cover that the characters never develop except in the most basic of arcs. I appreciate Fox's desire to keep this under 2 hours, but they should've gone for a simpler story or accepted that it would be a little long.
Victor Von Doom is perhaps the most problematic piece of all. He makes no sense. He's sort of a renegade genius (we're told that far more than we see it). He's left behind in the other dimension during the accident. When they return and retrieve him, he's a complete villain seeking to destroy the Earth for some reason. His powers make virtually no sense (telepathy and the power to make people prune and implode and maybe some lightning powers too). Instead of skipping ahead a year so the story could get to Victor, he should've been saved for a sequel in favor of developing the Fantastic Four as a team against a more generic threat in this movie.
Elephant in the Room: There must be something good about this? It's competently enough made. There's a couple moments with each character that are ok. Before he became the Thing, I was interested in what Jamie Bell was doing. There's a moment when Reed sends Ben a selfie of his project and Ben has a little fist pump to himself because he was proud of his friend. I liked that. It's a tiny gesture but also one of the few that wasn't the movie explicitly explaining what's going on. The few action scenes are ok. I'm grasping for examples of things I liked though.
To Sum Things Up (in 57 words or less):
I can’t find a way to recommend this movie, despite the on screen talent. This is an example of all that can go wrong when there’s “too many cooks” making a big studio action movie. It sure makes me appreciate the control that the Marvel Comic Universe has. R.I.P. Fantastic Four.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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