Fantastic Four is the third attempt at bringing comics’ first family to screen, counting the Roger Corman-produced version that was never really released. The last attempts were not so long ago, certainly not long enough ago to warrant the retelling of the origin story. But this version is all about the origin, the movie spending most of its time in laboratories talking pseudo-science as the characters build the machine that will eventually give them powers. Pretty much all of the superhero content happens in the last ten minutes, leaving of the rest of the film to be an expository slog.
Ever since he was in fifth grade, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been working on a device that can teleport objects. In high school and his best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) entered a prototype into the science fair. It was not received well, but Richards catches the eye of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), who runs a special school that is working on the same technology. Reed, working with Storm's children Sue and Johnny (Kate Mara and Michael B. Jordan), as well as the brilliant but troubled Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), manages to succeed in sending organic matter to another dimension and bringing it back safely. Fearing that their project is going to be taken away from them, Reed, Ben, Johnny and Victor decide to take a trip themselves.
Things go awry. They lose Victor, and the remaining three come back changed. Sue, who was in the same room, is changed as well. The four gain amazing powers, powers that the government intends to take advantage of. If you'll notice, much of this is just explaining the origin of these heroes. And that's a major problem with the movie. It is mostly a retread of the Fantastic Four's inception. What's lacking is a sense of adventure, or anything at all that will allow the characters to get into superheroics. It is essentially a movie about building a machine.
The film doesn't provide a crisis for these heroes until its final moments. It instead keeps the four apart for most of the film, giving them all little subplots about how they're dealing with the fact that they're changed. A lot of time is spent explaining what they can do and what the government wants to do with them. Some more time is spent on a search on Reed Richards, a little diversion that doesn't really amount to much in the end. Through it all, the film depicts these characters as ineffectual and generally unlikable. The initiating event of this film is built on these characters getting drunk and being reckless. Not exactly the stuff that superheroes are supposed to be made of.
It feels like the film is caught up in trying to be edgy. It wants these characters to be cool, so they’re all angsty and rebellious. And it’s all terribly uninteresting. Would it be too much to see these heroes act like heroes? By the end of the film, these characters don’t really feel like good guys. This young cast is stacked with talent, but no one really gets to shine in this context. There just isn’t much to hold on to. Miles Teller’s Reed Richards is kept off screen when he’s going through his toughest trials. Kate Mara’s Sue Storm is a cipher. Michael B. Jordan’s Johnny Storm is a bundle of clichés. Jamie Bell gets the most interesting material as Ben Grimm, but the character doesn’t really get enough time to work.
Fantastic Four is ninety percent origin story and ten percent dealing with a sudden world-threatening crisis. It’s got its priorities all wrong. Presumably, people want to see these guys do fantastic things. For most of the movie, these superheroes are stuck inside laboratories, building a machine that doubles as a plot device. The movie lumbers through scads of exposition, before rushing through a finale that just doesn’t feel earned.
My Rating:
