Why can't anyone make the Fantastic Four cool? It's a question
that doesn't just dog Hollywood, but Marvel Comics as well. Marvel's
"First Family" of superheroes are some of the company's most
well-known, and yet the comic consistently fails to connect with readers and
attempts to bring them to the big screen have been a disaster. And the thing is
it doesn't seem to matter what the approach is. Ignoring Roger Corman's super
low-budget version from the ''90s that never go released, there were two
Fantastic Four films in 2005 and 2007 that were largely forgettable, even
though if one were to look at them now they resemble the mainstream playbook
followed by Marvel's Avengers movies. But this new Fantastic Four film from Chronicle director Josh Trank appears to be
trying to follow the grim model set forth by Christopher Nolan, and that
approach doesn't jibe with these characters at all. To try and do so shows a
fundamental misunderstanding that the film has no hope of recovering from.
This is only Trank's second feature, but
still there were a lot of expectations based on the success of his first film. Chronicle was, basically, a superhero origin
story about teens who acquired fantastic powers they couldn't understand. It
was simple, smart, and balanced sci-fi with teen angst in a way that made him
the perfect choice to direct a rebooted and much younger-skewing Fantastic
Four. And yet the end result feels spliced together like some weird lab
experiment; taking pieces of great ideas and doing absolutely nothing with
them.
Clearly, Trank's vision was to do
something similar to Chronicle,
and at the film's outset it captures a similar sense of wide-eyed wonder. We
meet Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his best bud Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) as
kids, tinkering in Reed's garage to build a makeshift teleportation machine.
The two are completely different yet they find common ground in their unstable
home lives. Reed is a genius whose parents don't understand his intellect,
while Ben is a rough 'n tumble kid scraping by in an abusive household. In
fact, it's there that his famous battle cry "It's clobberin' time!"
makes an inauspicious debut. While their invention fries electrical circuits it
manages to be a marginal success at the school science fair, which captures the
attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adoptive daughter Sue
(Kate Mara), leading to a job offer at the Baxter Foundation where Reed can
take the experiment further, teleporting living beings rather than toy cars.
Assisting in the teleporter's construction is Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a
reclusive genius who discovered the secrets of teleportation first, only to
have Reed show up and improve them, causing all kinds of envious looks. There's
also Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), Franklin's biological son and resident
hot-head who can't avoid run-ins with the law. He's just as much of a brilliant
mind as the rest of his family, and fits in at the lab like a glove. After
succeeding in teleporting a terrified chimp to "Planet Zero" (Fox
should've tied this in to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), the group decides to
head there themselves with Ben in tow. Naturally things go terribly wrong;
Victor is lost in a tidal wave of strange glowing energy, and the rest of the
group is bathed in its mysterious power as well, granting them each incredible
powers
In Trank's attempts to eschew the typical
superhero model, he's made Fantastic Four a dull and dreary experience. There's
nothing wrong with his plan to focus on the characters rather than flashy
powers and fight scenes, but character development gives way to seemingly
endless amounts of exposition. Once the team gets back home and in government
possession, the time frame jumps ahead a full year so we don't even glimpse how
they come to grips with their new powers. Instead we see them already fully
experienced with using their gifts as weapons for the military, taking out
threats around the world. In theory, Trank's approach isn't a bad one and is
similar to what Ang Lee tried to do with his Hulk movie, making it more than just
the Hulk smashing things. But fans HATED Lee's Hulk film, just as they will likely
hate Trank's Fantastic Four because...well, it's pretty
boring. There are some interesting ideas, like exploring those whose powers are
a curse (like poor Ben Grimm), but Trank never commits to anything. There are
long stretches where it seems like nothing happens at all, and with Doom out of
the picture there is absolutely no conflict.
And it becomes obvious towards the film's
rushed finale that someone at 20th Century Fox realized the lack of tension,
because suddenly an all-powerful Doom emerges with a plan literally out of
nowhere to destroy the planet. It leads to a fairly dull battle in an ugly CGI
mountainous locale that will make you wonder where the $100M+ budget went. The
bulk of the film takes place in a lab. Sure, Johnny Storm looks cool when he
flames on, but Thing looks like walking peanut brittle and the other power
effects are unimpressive. Overlooking the mediocre effects would be easy if the
film were as fun as a Fantastic Four movie should be. The earlier movies may
not have been very cool by current standards, but at least they were colorful
and tried to match the adventurous spirit of the comics. They're called
Marvel's "First Family" for a reason, but those bonds are largely an
afterthought, hammered home haphazardly in one of Franklin's many
monologues. 
For months there has been speculation of a
troubled production, even going so far as to claim that Trank was removed as
director. That may or may not be true as all sides refute it, but what's undeniable
is that the screenplay by Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater, and Trank is a jumbled
mess of tones. You can easily see where Trank's contemplative vision abruptly
ends and others try to no avail to inject more humor and action. None of this
is the fault of the actors, who all do their best with one-note characters.
These are not the kind of smart, funny geeks anyone wants to hang out with.
They're the kind that should be sealed away in their labs with the microscopes.
Certainly they aren't characters we want to see again in a sequel, although the
film ends with an obnoxious attempt to set up a franchise nobody is going to be
asking for. That's not to say a sequel would be awful now that the lame origin
story is over, but Fantastic
Four may just be a comic
better left in the funny books rather than on the big screen.
Rating: 2 out of 5
