Movie Reviews - Fantastic Four (2015)

Uuuggghhhhh.

I-I don't want to talk about this movie. I don't want to talk about this movie to the point that I actually typed out a stutter. I TYPED OUT A STUTTER. And all-caps screamed! That just happened. I haven't even reviewed Ant-Man yet because I've been ridiculously busy lately, but I feel like I have no choice here, on the off chance that someone sees this and is spared the pain of seeing this film. This is seriously a contender for worst superhero movie ever. It may be one of the worst movies ever. It's certainly one of the worst movies that I've ever seen, and I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Howard the Duck. Actually I'm just going to come out and say it: Fant4stick is actually worse than Howard the Duck. At least Howard the Duck, or a movie like Batman and Robin, to use an example that more people are probably familiar with, is the kind of movie that is funny bad and easy to make fun of. This movie is just sad. It is a superhero movie played completely straight that is trying so, sooo hard to be good, and it just fails on every level.

Firstly, this movie had one of the most painfully terrible ensemble casts I've ever seen. Not that the actors were bad or anything. The four core actors really seemed like they were trying. They just didn't gel together. At all. At least the previous two Fantastic Four movies, with Chris Evans as Human Torch, had a main cast that worked well together. Those people felt like friends. They were believable as team-mates. These characters, whether due to poor direction or just a lack of chemistry between the actors, never came together. Every scene that they shared was like grinding teeth: painfully forced. There is a huge lull in the middle of this movie where nothing is happening, and this is usually where interactions between the mains can save the story, but here is just made things worse.

And then there was Toby Kebbell as Doom. Not Doctor Doom, just Doom. He was a joke. I mean that literally: this character cannot possibly be real, someone is obviously playing a joke on someone. He was basically a cartoon, and he was even further removed from the comic book counterpart than Julian McMahon's version from the '05 movie. I honestly didn't think this was possible until today.

But worst of all (and then I'll finally be able to close this review and scour the memory of the film from my brain with bleach, yay!) was the CGI. I love special effects. Practical effects, and good CGI, I don't discriminate, except in the case of early CGI and cheap CGI, where studios simply try to do things that are beyond their means (think any SyFy Original movie or any horror movie from the early 2000's). If you can't pull it off convincingly with the effects you have, don't do it. Period. Thankfully we seem to be in an era where this isn't a problem, in the case of any movie with a decent budget. Except apparently we aren't, because nearly every digital effect in this movie looked like something out of the '99 version of The Haunting. Even the green screen was bad! The Thing looked okay. Actually The Thing looked really good for the most part. The rest, however, just took you right out of the film. There is one scene, which I am positive will become infamous in a similar fashion to the bees scene from the remake of The Wicker Man, where Reed Richards stretches his features around to make himself looks like someone else. It is so bad that I can't even describe it. I honestly wondered if the movie had rolled out with an unfinished effect.

And the saddest part, aside from the fact that several really good actors will now have their names on this movie forever, is that it is clearly setting up for a sequel. The makers of this movie were so sure that this would be good, that this would be liked, that most of the dialogue is exposition and world-building (ironic since the world in which this story took place often looked entirely fake), preparing the viewer for revisiting this world again in the future, and setting the rules for sequels that this movie is never going to get. It is build-up for future films, to the extent that the build-up for this movie's own climax is about as sparse as the trailers for the movie themselves. In fact there is little specific to this movie that isn't summed up in the trailers. It is boring and bland, and it isn't fun to sit through at all, in any way imaginable. I give this movie a 0 out of 10 on my scale. It shouldn't exist, and in my mind, going forward, it doesn't.