In the X-Men films, you know when the opening 20th Century Fox logo fades to black, how the “X” is held for a fraction of a second longer? Well, Fantastic Four pulls the same trick, except it calls out a different letter: yep, the “F.” I couldn’t help but take that as a grade.
Following 2005’s Fantastic 4 and its 2007 sequel with Silver Surfer, this franchise reboot from Josh Trank (Chronicle) errs from the start — not necessarily by giving us the third screen telling of the quartet’s origin as much as by recasting our heroes as mopey, obnoxious, entitled teens. Reed Richards (Whiplash’s Miles Teller, toning down the smug) is the genius kid scientist who’s been toiling on teleportation since the fifth grade, with the aid of blue-collar pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell, Snowpiercer). Their work brings them to the attention of the Baxter Foundation, which recruits them to help the institute crack the riddle of interdimensional travel.
With further assistance from fellow student Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and Storm siblings Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, Creed) and Sue (Kate Mara, The Martian), they succeed and make a unsanctioned trip to “Planet Zero,” where these supposedly intelligent youngsters take Instagram selfies and touch mystery goo. This mutates all of them into, respectively, a living Stretch Armstrong doll, a pile of talking rocks, a crispy-burnt mummy, a flying fireball and an invisible woman who digs the trip-hop tunes of Portishead.
“We can’t change the past,” says Sue, who can create a force field, yet not a smile, “but we can change the future.” And so can you, by avoiding this needless iteration of the Marvel Comics mainstays, infinitely more of an embarrassment than Roger Corman’s infamously unreleased The Fantastic Four adaptation of 1994. Gripe at the aforementioned pair of mid-aughts adventures if you must, but at least they got the tone of the source material right, with bickering and in-fighting abound. Trask’s switch to making the team members morose and gloomy benefits no one; in fact, it compounds the movie’s problems, because in aiming for realism, the foursome’s realization of their changed bodies strikes viewers as worthy of ridicule. And it is.
Even before this Fantastic Four do-over opened, the clock struck clobberin’ time. Is it as bad as you’ve heard? No, but also yes — “no” because the sci-fi superhero tale is far from unskilled garbage, and “yes” because it is astonishingly leaden and as dull as it is expensive ($120 million). —Rod Lott
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