REVIEW -- Fantastic Four (2015)

Fantastic Four (stylized as Fant4stic) is a 2015 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name. It is the third theatrical Fantastic Four film to be distributed by 20th Century Fox, and a reboot of the Fantastic Four film franchise. Directed by Josh Trank, with a screenplay by Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg and Trank, the film stars Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, and Tim Blake Nelson. In Fantastic Four, the team must learn to harness abilities gained from an alternate universe to save Earth from a friend turned enemy.

Cast:

Miles Teller as Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic
Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm / Human Torch
Kate Mara as Susan "Sue" Storm / Invisible Woman
Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm / Thing
Toby Kebbell as Victor von Doom / Doctor Doom
Reg E. Cathey as Dr. Franklin Storm
Tim Blake Nelson as Dr. Harvey Allen

Additionally, Dan Castellaneta portrays Mr. Kenny, Reed's grade school teacher and Tim Heidecker appears as Mr. Richards, Reed's stepfather.

The Plot:

Friends Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) have worked together on a prototype teleporter since their childhood, eventually attracting the attention of ProfessorFranklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), director of the Baxter Foundation, a government-sponsored research institute for young prodigies. Reed is recruited to join them and aid Storm's children, scientist Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and technician Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), into completing a "Quantum Gate" designed by Storm's wayward protégé, Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who begrudgingly agrees to help due to his unrequited feelings for Sue.

The experiment is successful, and the facility's supervisor, Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), assembles a group of astronauts to venture into a parallel dimension known as "Planet Zero". Disappointed at being denied the chance to join the expedition, Reed, Johnny, and Victor recruit Ben to help them commandeer the Quantum Gate and embark on an unsanctioned voyage to Planet Zero, which they learn is a world filled with otherworldly substances. Victor attempts to collect a sample of the substances, causing the entire structure they're in to collapse and the ground to erupt with a green lava-like substance. Reed, Johnny, and Ben return to their shuttle just as Sue brings them back to Earth. Victor is left behind after he falls into the collapsing landscape. The machine explodes, altering Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben on a molecular-genetic level, affording them super-human conditions and abilities beyond their control: Reed can stretch like rubber, Sue can become invisible and generate force fields of energy, Johnny can engulf his entire body in flames and fly, and Ben becomes bigger and develops a rocklike hide which gives him enhanced strength and durability. They are then placed in government custody and confinement to be studied and have their conditions and abilities tested. Blaming himself for the accident, Reed escapes the facility and becomes a fugitive while desperately trying to find a cure.

One year later, Reed is located in Central America by Sue and captured by Ben, who has become a military asset along with Johnny and Sue. Johnny and Sue have been outfitted with specialized suits, one of which Reed later receives, designed to keep up with their conditions and abilities and to help them stabilize, control, and contain their abilities. Reed is brought to Area 57, where Dr. Allen conscripts him to open another portal to Planet Zero in exchange for giving Reed the necessary resources to find a cure. Arriving in Planet Zero, Dr. Allen's explorers find Victor, who has been fused to his spacesuit and can now control the elements, as well as having telekinetic abilities, and bring him back to Earth. Driven insane by the experience and believing the human race needs to be destroyed so he can rebuild Planet Zero in his image, Victor escapes, killing scientists and soldiers in the base including Dr. Allen and Professor Storm. Victor returns to Planet Zero using the Quantum Gate, with Ben, Johnny, Reed, and Sue in pursuit.

On Planet Zero, Victor activates a portal, using a structure he made while in the realm, that begins consuming the landscape of the Earth. He is confronted by the four and, after a destructive battle, Ben punches Victor into the portal's energy beam, disintegrating him, while Johnny closes the portal. Returning to Earth, the group is rewarded for their heroics by being given a new base of operations by the United States military. They decide to use their powers to help people and adopt the mantle of the "Fantastic Four".

The Verdict:

We ALL knew this was going to be bad didn't we? From casting Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch/Johnny Storm to the leak of early BAD reviews that FOX were trying to hide from the public before the film's release, it was going to be ugly. If you don't know already but this film has a Rotten Tomatoes score LOWER than Dragonball Evolution. That has to be a world record or something...

I happened to be bored on my day off from work on the day of the film's release, August 7, so I went to see the film during the local movie theater's matinee hours.


To be quite honest, the first two-thirds of the film aren't really bad. It's the last third of the film that ruins what the director was trying to do here, who was reportedly hindered by FOX tampering with his vision, ranging from editing out and removing 3 additional key action scenes, and completely altering the film's ending. I don't know how much of that is true, but I'm writing this review given from what I've seen in the theater.

The film takes the "safe" route for the most part with its narrative. Tell me if you haven't heard these cliches before: Nerd makes a friend after being pitied for their peers making fun of said nerd - friend becomes the nerd's best friend for life. Nerd boy meets nerd girl who he has crush on. Nerd girl has "cool" brother and "protective" father. Rival nerd boy hates that nerd girl is developing feelings for nerd boy. Rival nerd boy becomes super-villain out of his jealousy. Protective father dies to motivate heroes. Nerd boy, nerd girl, and their friends and family have to bond together to stop this common threat. Bad guy is defeated and everything goes back to normal Star Wars: Episode 1 - Phantom Menace style - almost every "big" superhero film since the original Avengers and beyond has used that trope and gotten away with it, especially if it's based off of any of Marvel's heroes.

Yeah, it's the cookie cutter formula for almost every generic superhero origin story. It's odd in this film's case as they don't even have toys to market this film towards. Then let's be serious here. I wouldn't take my kids to see this (if I had any to begin with, even though I've seen and spoke with a few parents after the screening) to say that Thing isn't wearing underwear and is sporting a "rock boner" and Doctor Doom is walking around exploding people's brains in a bloody mess and setting people on fire like he's in Carrie. I love how we get like NO explanation of what exactly is Doom's powers here, just like F4 franchise before this one.

Like seriously, how hard is it to do Doctor Doom? I can't understand how people keep messing this character up this bad. He's one of - if not the best - top Marvel villains and no one seems to know what they are doing with him in Hollywood. Here's what you do, you make him the tyrant ruler of his own sovereign nation. He's a genius - even more so than Tony Stark/Ironman - and more full of himself, but when word gets out about Reed Richards' experiment, it makes him jealous and seeks out to destroy him to take his work as his own. You go from there with teasing the first encounter between Doom and the F4. It's not that hard, people.

In terms of keeping the family-dynamic that makes the Fantastic Four true to their comic book-origins, it's completely lost here. Reed Richards' actor is superb but he can't pull a one man show here, despite being one of the only saving graces of this film. Susan Storm's actress gets the award of the most boring and stale actresses to ever play the Invisible Woman to date. I have nothing against Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm here, but he does nothing to make the character his own and only comes off as extremely generic in the role even though the effects for his powers were awesome. Ben Grimm/Thing gets little to no development at all as he wouldn't even have been dragged into the experiment if Reed didn't drag him along into this mess after a drunken phone call. No, seriously that's how it happens. Doctor Doom isn't much of a genius here, but more of a computer hacker than anything else. He honestly reminds me of the geek in charge of the gaming company (J.P.) that the protagonist in Grandma's Boy works for.

The lack of dialogue and character development hurts this team dynamic even more when they all just magically agree to work as a team out of sheer convenience and logical thinking when their efforts to fight Doctor Doom one-on-one doesn't work. Even during that sequence, I was sitting there wondering why Doctor Doom just didn't do that brain exploding thing on all of them to defeat them with ease, but apparently logic went completely out of the window during the finale of the film. Yeah... this film has more plot holes in it than Pacific Rim...

It's a damn shame too as once they hit the point where Baxter Industries return to "Planet Zero" - which is what I understood as the Negative Zone from the Marvel Comics Universe - and salvaged Doctor Doom's transformed body, that's where the film goes completely downhill. There's NO explanation of how Doom survived or what exactly is his powers. Sure, the film gave viewers a loose intepretation of what each member of the F4's powers were, but we get nothing but a horror movie style rampage where Doom walks down a corridor slaughtering soldiers with ease by merely looking at them as if it's a Darth Vader's Force choke or something. I think the F4 should've tried to fight Doom here or reveal that he had the inhabitants of that planet under his control for a bit of action prior to his escape from confinement.

Here is even better idea if I wrote the script for this film - Remember that chimp/monkey that they sent over to the other side first? I would've had 3 primates and wrote the film with the Red Ghost as the feature villain of this "origin story" as a Soviet scientist trying to steal American military secrets from Baxter Industries' research and try to recreate the experiment that gave the F4 their powers. In my version, I would have had the ragtag crew of friends testing the machine themselves since the military choose to get involved first so they wanted to test their work themselves. You know, the clichéd scientists want to give their all into their work cliché, much like how the Cheetah became a female feline in DC Comics or any other hero/villain you can think of as a result of a lab experiment going wrong. The impromptu trip gives the F4 their powers as planned - yada yada yada. Instead of the drunken night with the boys, Red Ghost (who was one of the scientists who happens to be a part of Baxter Industries) secretly recreates the experiment for himself and the primates so you have Red Ghost and his Super-Apes to match the F4 for this film. But yeah... enough of me trying to remedy Hollywood's mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, let's talk about Dr. Doom. Once Doctor Doom is reintroduced, the film is literally in fast-forward to race to the end credits. By the way, there's no post-credits teaser or anything so you're left wondering what was the point of pulling the trigger on the finale so fast. This film could have been adverted from the disaster that it ends up being if they didn't squander everything good (Reed's road towards redemption, Franklin Storm's battle to reunite his family, the actual attempt to focus on science here, the sheer horror of receiving powers like these for any individual, etc.) they established in the finale. Within mere minutes, Franklin's killed by Doom and everyone tends to forget that Reed got everyone into this mess in the first place with his crazy experiment and stops concerning themselves with finding a cure to their conditions. The film goes "Nope!" and turns into a Power Rangers-inspired subplot where we just forget about everything else and worry about beating the bad guy as everything else will just happen to work out in the end. It turns into "We're a team now and that's all that matters!"

To be honest, I went into this film expecting the worst, but I kept an open mind to this new interpretation and narrative approach, despite being a fan of the source material that the Fantastic Four are deprived from. There were a few elements in this film that could have made this a successful hit, but FOX and the director didn't play all of the cards that they were dealt. For example, the "alternate dimension" plot could have panned out to a potential crossover with the X-Men Cinematic Universe and could have tied the event that gave the F4 their powers to some type of mutant activity in their universe since the F4 universe obviously doesn't have any. Another example where Victor von Doom is merely a spectator to Reed Richards' work could have benefited FOX in a sequel where his jealousy could have driven him to becoming a supervillain (PERFECT post-credits teaser) after seeing Reed successfully complete the work that he could not, instead of making him a disposable villain here (a mistake that the previous F4 films made not once but TWICE). I liked the idea of Susan and Reed not hitting it off on their romance immediately instead of it being love at first sight like it's established in most cartoons and films in the past, but Reed still won her over with little effort shortly after - yet again, another missed opportunity.

Sadly, that's the perfect way to sum up this film - an amalgamation of missed opportunities.

Watch it or Don't Bother?

If you're a comic book fan, you're going to want to see how bad this latest fuck-up by FOX is, especially given how vocal everyone is on social media is about it for you won't be left out of the water cooler discussions in your social circles. As for everyone else, I suggest don't even bother. It's going to be on Redbox VERY soon once the word gets out about how bad this is.

You know it's bad when Stan Lee doesn't even make a cameo, even though personally endorsing the film on his personal website.

Don't get me wrong. It's nowhere as bad as the Ang Lee-directed Hulk film, but it's definitely the worst Fantastic Four film to date. If you want a great Fantastic Four film that's amazing from start to finish, go rent Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles. That's a damn shame that Disney knew how to do Fantastic Four movies YEARS before acquiring Marvel Comics. FOX give up the ghost and let the F4 go back home where they belong.