Movie Review: Fantastic Four (2015)

Fant 4 Stic sounds like a great title for a
superhero movie

Let's just get this out of the way: Fantastic Four is a bad movie. There's no sense in beating around the bush with this one. Fantastic Four is bad in just about every way. I bet if you were to crack open a dictionary and look up the definition of "bad film", you'd see Fantastic Four's poster sitting right beside it.

With that being said, Fantastic Four manages to achieve a special level of bad, a level that leaves the view perplexed and downright confused after watching this utter train-wreck of a film. You question whether you've just seen an incomplete movie that was slapped together by the heads of a corporation so they could keep the rights to this somewhat cursed property. You wonder what pieces of this travesty were part of the director's original vision, and what was hastily wielded into place by producers to meet some weird, bottom line. You wonder if this film ever had a chance of being something good, or was doomed from the start.

Fantastic Four is like a Rubix cube that has been scrambled, but happens to also be missing a large chunk, making it very difficult to solve. Also, the cube has been covered in a layer of shit, just to make things even harder for you.

The film possesses numerous problems. The most notable is the jumbled mess of a story where things just happen because that's what the script says happens, or introduces plot points that will just be ignored or never fully explored during the rest of film. The tone also jumps from your typical superhero action film to something that would be more at home in a Cronenberg film. The cinematography is lifeless and uninteresting, the effects lackluster, and the direction insipid. I'm actually shocked that this film made it to theaters in this state.

There are a small handful of things that do work in the film's favor, like its short run time and its cast. Fantastic Four is about 1 hour and 40 minutes long and thankfully moves at a brisk pace, making the actual sit a relatively easy one. The acting isn't bad either. It's not amazing, but the cast does as much as they can with what little they are given, with Miles Teller & Michael B. Jordan being the obvious standouts. The only performance that was truly bad was Toby Keller's turn as Victor Von Doom. He plays one of the best comic book villains ever as a whiny, indignant asshat who suddenly wants to destroy the world near the end of the movie because of stupid reasons.

I know some of you are probably curious about how bad Fantastic Four is after hearing so many negative things about. Some are probably so curious they actually want to see the movie. Here's my suggestion for you. Go find a bootleg of the Roger Corman film and watch that instead. While it's not a great movie, it's at least enjoyably bad. Hell, I'd even suggest watching the Tim Story films from 2005 & 2007 over this film. Just skip this one. You'll thank me for it later.