By now its no secret that the new Fantastic Four, or Fant4stic, is a box office failure. Multiple websites have both critics and general audience reviews on the movie and the general conscience is relatively the same. The movie sucks. Well I am here to tell you about what I thought, so if you're tired of Fantastic 4 reviews just strap yourselves in for one more!
The Story: (Spoilers)
IF YOU HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE FEEL FREE TO SKIP:
Okay well the story for this movie is generally the same along the lines of the last Fantastic Four movie made in 2005, but with some changes. Reed Richards is a genius, all he wants to do is be able to teleport and with the help of his friend Ben Grimm he manages to do so. While showing off his machine Dr. Storm finds the pair and tell them that he has been working on a similar concept and believes that Reed can help finish the job. So Reed, alone.....without Ben, goes to the Baxter building, helps build the machine with the help of Sue Storm, Dr. Storms adoptive daughter, and Victor Von Doom (ghee I wonder who the bad guy is going to be in this film). After being a reckless mess, Dr. Storms son Johnny joins the team so he can buy a car. After what seems like an eternity watching them build this machine the three young men, (Victor, Reed, and Johnny) decide that they want to be the first ones to travel to this new planet which they have discovered using the machine in which they built. So after few shots of grandpa's cough medicine, Reed calls up Ben and gets him to join. The four travel to what they call Planet Zero where everything is just rock with a green glowing goo in the middle of it. Bad stuff happens and the four try to escape, Sue gets injured (somehow) trying to help, Victor falls to his death, (if your not aware of who he is and believe that sort of thing), and Reed, Ben, Johnny, along with Sue (again I really don't understand how) are transformed. Reed wakes up and is horrified at what he sees when he finds out that Ben, his best friend, is some hideous rock monster. Not being able to trust the men who have taken them to a secret base, Reed leaves with his final words saying “I'll fix this.” 1 year later and, what do ya know, Reed hasn't fixed it. Instead the three remaining of the team are being trained on how to use their powers with Ben being used in the field as a military weapon. Sue uses her tech skills and tracks Reed down to bring him back and help build a second machine to go back to Planet Zero. With Reed on board he is able to make the new machine work in, and I'm just paraphrasing here, “ten minutes, maybe less”. With the machine up and running the government waste no time (like they always do), to shove people in that untested second machine and send people off back to Planet X, I mean Zero. Okay look it doesn't matter the name is stupid no matter what. With a new team of extra's.....um scientists, on the planet they stumble across Victor, who turns out is not dead!
But along with not being dead he's dressed in garbage bags for some reason. The suit he was wearing has melted onto his body, making him hideous to look at. The team of extras bring back Garbage bag man and strap him to a chair to decide to run tests on him and try and discover what they don't know. Victor doesn't like this, and decides he hates this world and wants to go back to Planet Hector Zeroni. He breaks lose from the strapped chair and goes on a killing spree which includes Dr. Storm (even though that's looked over) and returns to the other world. The team give chase to him, knowing that the machine will cause a black hole to and eat their world with it. Once inside the planet the four heroes attempt to stop Doom, but despise their efforts, are unable to defeat him. Luckily for them though Reed is able to give them a few words of wisdom and they all work together, sending Doom into the blue light into the sky (literally) and return home. After they return back to earth, they look into the giant hole in the ground that Doom created, talk with some military people and claim they will not fight for them any longer. So instead they get a shiny new place to work and discuss a team name just before the screen cuts black and the credits roll.
THOUGHTS:
Now you might be thinking to yourself that it seems like I got bored writing the story by the end because I really finished that up quickly, and seemed to cram the last few scenes into very few words. Well I did that on a purpose because that's exactly what the film did. The pacing in this movie is some of the worst that I have seen in recent films, they constantly rush through things that I wanted to see more, like Reed and Ben's interactions, to get to nothing, literally nothing. There are so many scenes that seem rushed only to get to the parts of the movie that nothing happens, and the worst part is that when they get to these parts, the scenes seem to drag on forever. Nothing should seem to drag in a movie that is only One hour and Thirty-two minutes long, its like a roller coaster that has to ever now and then apply the breaks while not being on a hill. From the point where the team enters Planet Zero to confront Doom all the way to the end of the movie is roughly ten minutes! It took forty minutes for them to get their powers, and I know sometimes that's okay and you have to let the story develop but not in a movie that is only an hour and thirty-two minutes, and not when the majority of the first forty minutes is nothing. This movie needed to be longer, as horrifying as that sounds, it needed better pacing. I want to note that the time when (SPOILERS) dies, to the end of the film, they just sorta forget about it. They don't show any remorse for the character that died, they say one thing about it in the last two minutes and movie on, all happy go lucky because they got a new building. I don't even think they showed more than ten seconds of emotion about the death. Then there's the poor CGI in the film, half the time its good but its to inconstant, you see the Thing throw a tank and the tank just disappears, just vanishes and a quick burst of fire pops up, it's like they didn't even try, also I want to note the horrible CGI monkey, when they just could of, uh I don't know, got a real monkey! The thing just sits in a chair, that's the whole purpose of the monkey. A lot of the jokes were just to lame and cheesy, you could see them coming from a mile away and just landed completely flat, I think I laughed once, and it was because the way the monkey looked. The actors did, an okay job, now there where some parts where they didn't look like they wanted to be there anymore and then there's some parts that they actually did put in a good effort.
Miles Teller did a good job as Reed, you saw him want to be the person to find teleportation, how excited he was when he found it and then how he felt when he felt responsible for turning his friends into this.
Michael B Jordan was a good Johnny Storm, the fact that they cast a black guy as Johnny didn't take away from the fact that he did the character justice, it was a good role, but I feel like the script or director really limited not only him but all the actors.
Jamie Bell seemed to not want to be there, I didn't really like him in the movie even after the fact that he was the only one I thought I was really going to enjoy, he didn't have many lines and then once he became the Thing I forgot it was him, and not in a good way.
Kate Mara's performance was pretty bland in my opinion, she didn't bring anything that made me want to care about her character, or make me believe that it wasn't just her acting, it was dull.
Toby Kebbell as Doctor Doom wasn't the greatest villain in comic book movie history, and not even Toby's best take on a villain. But I feel if the third act was longer than fifteen minutes, it would have really benefited his character and fleshed him out more. Even though they completely botched Doctor Doom in this movie and made him wear garbage bags all over his body. This is the third (not counting the 90's movie) attempt at Doctor Doom and, I don't understand what the hell FOX is doing, that they can't get it right. So I refuse to cal him Doctor Doom and he will be known as Garbage Bag man, this is a movie where the Fant4stic fight Garbage Bag Man. Let that sink in
But, as shocking as it may sound, there where parts of the movie I did enjoy. The whole scene where you see them with their powers for the first time is done in a horror type of way and it was really fun to watch that, this really made me think that what it would be like to wake up and find yourself with superpowers, and thinking how freaked out I would be if my body was on fire, or made of rocks, it was the one thing that really stuck out to me as a cool scene.
To be honest, with the amount of production problems, the director being a complete acting Nazi, the entire thing being rushed out, its a miracle that this movie is making any money even though it is a box office bomb. Now taking that into account and also even though I did like some of the acting and, one scene, it cannot be excused for what we got as a final product. The movies pacing, CGI, editing, bad jokes, wigs. Oh yeah, if you haven't heard or are completely blind while watching this, so many re shoots took place that Kate Mara had to wear a bleach blonde wig that doesn't even match her normal hair in the movie, its painfully obvious. This movie is not good, I honestly didn't hate it as much as I thought, but that might be do to the fact I went in knowing how bad it was having read and watched many reviews on the movie. So what is the final score? Fant4stic vs Garbage Bag Man gets a.....
3/10
I can't suggest even renting this, you can not lie to yourself while watching it, saying to yourself, “this isn't so bad” This is a Hollywood budget movie and it failed on so many levels, it even fails on simple things that no movie from Hollywood should ever fail on. Thank you for reading and I know this was a lengthy review but there is a lot of crap that has to be sorted through in this movie.