Fantastic Four (2015)

RATING: C-

Let's begin off by saying that I don't exactly know a whole lot about the Fantastic Four. I never watched the previous two movies (watching the trailer for the first one kept me away), and I pretty much only ever knew the Four's abilities--and that's essentially only because The Incredibles' powers ripped off much of the Four's. 

That said, I had always heard good things about them in the comics, so I was of course interested in seeing these guys on the screen. A promising trailer was released for the new one, and it wasn't until the reviews came flooding in that the "uh-oh" factor came in. 

We'll cut straight to the chase. This film is about as stereotypical and predictable of a superhero origin story as it gets. The only real different twist is that we see a bit more of the characters as kids and how they got to the point of the accident that changed them than usual. But it's pretty straightforward from there. Four people go to another dimension (which is a little different, I suppose), and end up coming into contact with alien energy... or something. That transforms them into new beings. And they are forced to work together when one of the guys who went with them but supposedly died comes back insane with power trying to destroy the world (Dr. Doom, of course). 

What, no spoiler alert? Well, it's not like any of that was surprising, right? And you're probably not going to watch this film anyway unless you're a massive superhero movie fan. 

Now, aside from its plot, the film has another host of problems. Due to a lot of changes during production (more on that later), the film feels awfully inconsistent at times in tone. There are some parts that actually feel somewhat intelligent, but then other parts that are either derivative or dull. The screenplay is awful; and at times it almost seems like the actors are falling asleep from having to be in this movie (and there's no chemistry between them either). Miles Teller in general is an awful choice for Mr. Fantastic--a guy who seems like he's supposed to be the intelligent leader of the group. The problem is, Teller's only good at one type of role: the jerkface arrogant role that he plays in Divergent (and even there, he's still annoying as crap). *Really* bad choice in casting there, Fox... 

Unfortunately, many of the reasons this movie falls short of the mark fall upon the chaos that happened during production. There was Josh Trank's questionable behavior during production, which led to 20th Century Fox redoing much of the movie (the finale itself wasn't even written or done by Trank) on their own. The result isn't exactly glamorous. 

So what are the redeeming factors of this movie? Well, the visuals and special effects are pretty good. Toby Kebbell does pretty well as Dr. Doom (though his powers sure are vague). And in all honesty, many would probably like it more if we hadn't already seen this type of film done over several times. If the film hadn't been so badly butchered during production, maybe that would've helped too. And really, it's not a film that is straight up horrible; it's just not very good either. 

Fantastic Four feels like a film that could've been a lot better, but it just isn't; it's one of those films that you kind of have to put an asterisk next to because of the chaos in production. It's quite sad that characters like these from superhero comics with such promise have such bad things happen to them in cinema. Maybe the third time will be the charm for them.