Movie Review: "Fantastic Four" (Josh Trank, 2015)

GRADED F FOR FANT4STIC by Mo Shaunette

Above: Miles Teller as Reed Richards. Photo © 20th Century Fox.

Normally in these reviews, I talk about things like story, acting, themes, etc, giving you a general idea of what the movie's like.  However, Fox’s new “Fantastic 4” (or “Fant4stic,” because replacing letters with numbers is totally kewl!) is so utterly lacking in all of those departments that I thought it would be better to just recap this 100-minute failure-to-launch so that you, the viewing public, may understand the many shortcomings of this movie without needing to spend your hard-earned money on it.  Let’s begin, shall we?

The film (based on the characters that kick-started Marvel's iconic 60's-era renaissance) commences in small-town New York, where young prodigy Reed Richards is experimenting with building a teleporter.  His teacher (Dan Castellanata, collecting an easy paycheck between seasons of voicing Homer on “The Simpsons”) tells him to be more realistic in his aspirations (not unlike what I imagine the studio heads told director Josh Trank and his team).  Classmate Ben Grimm, however, is intrigued by the idea and agrees to help Reed build his prototype, providing the invaluable service of telling him to use a Phillips-head screwdriver instead of a slotted one.  Truly, they are a scientific force to be reckoned with.

We also see Ben’s home life, where his older brother beats him up after quickly saying, “It’s clobberin’ time,” hoping that the audience won’t notice that Ben’s iconic catchphrase is now associated with physical abuse.  Also, we see a menorah on the mantelpiece in his house, assuring the audience that Ben Grimm (who eventually morphs into a character called the Thing) is still Jewish, despite the fact that the tie-in “Thing Burger” at Denny’s has bacon on it.

Anyway, l’il Reed and Ben make a functioning teleporter that makes a toy car disappear and brings back a soil sample.  Cut to seven years later and the duo are now teens played by Miles Teller and Jamie Bell, respectively.  They try to demonstrate the teleporter in front of Homer Simpson at a science fair, but it doesn’t work entirely and they are once again shunned (the laughter in the audience did a better job of informing me that this was comedy than the scene did).

However, Reed and Ben’s work is noticed by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara).  The Storms immediately offer Reed a scholarship with the Baxter Foundation, a government-funded research group for young geniuses that just so happens to be working on the exact same thing as Reed, only bigger (they call it a “quantum gate”).  Reed jumps at the chance to join, leaving Ben to continue living and working at his family's scrap yard.  Them’s the breaks, Benjy.

We are then given a scene where Reed begins exploring the library at the Baxter Building and runs into Sue, who is listening to music and reading.  Sue explains music in scientific terms of pattern recognition, allowing the screenwriters (Mr. Trank, Simon Kinberg, and Jeremy Slater) to show off how many articles about science they read and also establish what Sue’s “thing” is.  Reed then decides to talk about his favorite book, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and explain the plot to Sue, because he assumes that a girl who comes from a background of physics and engineering couldn’t possibly know the plot of one of the most iconic pieces of science-fiction literature.  This establishes what Reed’s “thing” is (his love of "20,000 Leagues,” not his being a dumbass).

Meanwhile, Franklin is arguing with his board of directors about funding for the Foundation, particularly with the facility supervisor, played by Tim Blake Nelson.  It’s unclear if he works for the government or just wants to work with them, but I’m going to assume the former.  Anyway, Dr. Government Man learns that Franklin is also planning on bringing back the former leader of the quantum gate project, Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who has bad blood with the organization.  Franklin insists he’s earned a second chance.

Victor, as it turns out, is a colossal jerk who now lives in a scienced-up bachelor pad (he’s like Tony Stark with a quarter of the budget and none of the style).  He only agrees to leave behind his life of listening to terrible music in the dark while playing off-brand “Street Fighter” when he learns that Sue is still working at Baxter, because the villain lusting after the female lead is totally fresh material, right?

The film also brings in Sue’s brother Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), who is introduced to us as he races (and subsequently crashes) his customized car.  Yep, for about three minutes there, “Fant4stic” becomes the most half-ass “Fast and Furious” sequel ever.  Dear old dad pays for his son’s medical bills on the condition that he also work on the quantum gate project, thus leading to a building-stuff montage that only exists to establish that our characters are good at science.

It’s at this point in the recap that I feel I should mention the acting: it’s terrible across the board.  Part of this is because the script that gives our mains the slimmest of personalities, but even then the cast seems to be on autopilot.  Mr. Teller doesn’t have the wide-eyed wonder the film hints at, Ms. Mara is given precisely fuck-all to do, Mr. Jordan seems to be trying to give his character more charm than the screenplay does, and Mr. Bell just grumbles his way through Ben’s lines.  The worst offender is Mr. Kebbell, whose Doom is entirely lifeless and dull, and whose stunning lack of range and charisma only makes things worse.

Eventually, the quantum gate is built and tested, successfully sending a chimpanzee into and out of another dimension (and teasing fanboys like me with the possibility of an origin for regular F4 villains the Super-Apes).  Government Man then tells our team that while they were promised to be the first ones to walk on Planet Zero (the eventual name of the other dimension), they’re actually going to send NASA astronauts to the other side.  Disheartened, Reed, Johnny, and Victor spend the night drinking.

After some speechifying from Victor about how nobody will ever know their names, Reed decides that they should cross the gate first anyway, despite his earlier assertion that he doesn’t care about being famous.  He also calls Ben to come with him, because teenagers make stupid decisions when they’re drunk.  Ben agrees to sneak into a major tech lab with his intoxicated scientist friends in the middle of the night and breach the known barriers of space and time because Ben doesn’t have a lot of foresight.  Regardless, the four science bros suit up and pass through the gate, becoming the first humans to land on Planet Zero (which I will be calling Peezo).

Notice someone missing from this equation?  Sue freaking Storm!  Apparently, she can’t come on the guys’ dimensional adventure because girls ruin good times with their cooties and whatnot.  Still, she (and only she) notices that the gate has been activated and runs down to the lab to monitor their progress.

While on Peezo, Reed and friends find pools of energy strewn about.  Victor—who is either hypnotized by the planet somehow, or just plain stupid—sticks his hand in one, causing a chain reaction and a series of explosions.  The four race back to the gate, but a burst of energy overpowers Victor.  Reed, Johnny, and Ben make it back to the teleporter pods and Sue pulls them back, bringing with them enough space energy to give them all superpowers…a full hour into the 100-minute movie.

Our heroes then wake up and discover, to their horror, what they’ve become: Reed gets stretchy, Sue turns invisible, Johnny can light on fire, and Ben becomes made of stone, leading to me wishing that he was voiced by Annie Savage yelling in her best caveman voice, “I’M A ROCK MAN!” (Thrilling Adventure Hour joke!)  Anyway, Reed escapes the super-secret army base they're being kept at and promises Ben that he’ll find a cure for him before stretching off into the night.

 

We then cut to one year later.  Yes, you heard me right, we have a random time-skip this far into the movie.  By now, Sue and Johnny have figured out their powers and Ben has been sent on covert missions for the government, with Johnny soon to follow.  So not only have there been potentially cool action scenes and training montages happening off screen, but according to a presentation given by Government Man, Ben apparently has fifty-seven kills to his name.  Oy vey.

Meanwhile Reed has been off the grid; buying parts to build another quantum gate, tracking Ben’s movements, and discretely taking intel from the Foundation.  Sue is tasked with tracking him down because pattern recognition is her thing, remember?  She realizes what Reed’s been doing because one of the logins to the Foundation is from “capt. n3m0,” because “20,000 Leagues” was his thing, remember?

The government sends a squad of goons along with Ben to retrieve Reed so he can finish a second quantum gate for them (the first one was destroyed by the superpowers incident).  They arrive at his hidey-hole in Peru and for a good one-to-two-minutes, we get an action scene of Reed “fighting” government guys.  Then Ben shows up and head butts him unconscious.  I’d say that the action was fun while it lasted, but I’d be lying.  "Fant4stic" and the concept of "fun" do not occupy the same dimension.

Back at HQ, Reed figures out the final thing they need for the second gate to work within minutes, because he’s just that ding-dang smart.  It’s activated and some NASA guys go through it that very day.  After they land on Planet Zero, Reed watches the camera feed from the teleporter pods and exclaims that the landscape has changed; it never occurs to him that maybe the NASA team landed on a different part of the planet than he did.  The NASA team then sees something moving in the distance: Victor, somehow still alive after all these months.

If you followed “Fant4stic”’s marketing at all, you may have noticed that its lead villain was suspiciously absent from most of it.  That’s because the post-Peezo Victor looks terrible.  His spacesuit has melted onto him and he now has spots that glow green with hokey-looking space energy.  Also, Victor has inexplicably taken to wearing a cape with a hood.  I choose to believe he sewed it out of rocks, because as we find out later, Doom’s main power is doing stuff with rocks.

Back in the base, Doom explains that the planet is something of a living organism that sustained him for those many months, and that there’s potential for new life on Peezo.  Capitalizing on his earlier nihilistic ramblings, he then decides that the best way to fuel Peezo’s reinvention as a life-bearing planet is to demolish the Earth and use its resources.  He begins using his vaguely-defined telekinetic powers to kill scientists and blow up Government Man before storming through the base to get back to the gate to Peezo, overloading it in order to create a black hole.  Also, he kills Franklin Storm on the way back because what would a superhero story be without a dead parent?

Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben, united for the first time ever in the movie (FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE IT ENDS), follow Doom onto Peezo in a sequence that looks like the “Doctor Who” opening, prompting me to sing the “Doctor Who” theme song.  After Doom puts on his fabulous cape again, he uses a bunch of rocks to build a device that shoots a blue beam into the sky (because blue beams have become prerequisite for superhero movies).

The Four arrive and fight Doom, but he beats them all by throwing rocks at them.  However, one of the Four (I forget which. Probably Reed) knocks him down long enough for Reed to give a “teamwork is good, you guys” speech, which leads to the unbeatable strategy of “everybody punch the bad guy at the same time.”  Ridiculously, this is enough to knock Doom into the big blue science beam and disintegrate him.  The Four then escape Peezo together through the portal, I sing the “Doctor Who” theme again, a big fuck-off crater appears in the middle of upstate New York, and the day is saved.

Finally, we get a wrap-up where new government men agree to give the Four carte blanche for doing their research, because apparently all they needed to get that was to have Ben intimidate a few generals.  The finishing touch is Reed coming up with a name for his new superhero team…but before he can say it, he’s cut off by the end credits.  Apparently, the filmmakers decided that that gag was so funny in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” that it would work okay here too.

“Fant4stic” is a dud; not a spectacular failure or a misfire, but a dull, drab, lifeless movie, pushed forward by an unengaging script and half-hearted performances.  It's not just uninterested in entertaining its audience, it doesn't seem to want to say or do anything new or exciting with its source material.  Honestly, there’s so little effort and enthusiasm in this picture that it’s not even worth hating.  Fox has said they have plans for a sequel but I sincerely doubt we’ll ever see one.  Even if you love superheroes or science-fiction, give this one a hard pass.