Fantastic Four (2015)
My name is Deggsy, and I am a Marvel Zombie.
I started into Marvel comics via my other love, Godzilla, when the latter was introduced into a limited series that I devoured as a child. Looking back at it now, it was… limited not just in number, but in plot: Godzilla would show up somewhere, and superheroes or S.H.I.E.L.D would fight him and end up causing more destruction than if they’d just listened to the obligatory loyal Japanese kid and just Let Him Be.
Loved this comic!
Anyway, this isn’t about Godzilla, it’s about The Fantastic Four, which was my favourite first comic, and I so wanted to be Mister Fantastic: his power, his brains, his outfit, his gadgets, his white-streaked hair.
Well, I got the hair.
I grew less enamoured of the various attempts to put the superhero team/family to film: Roger Corman’s aborted effort, those two movies with Jessica Alba and her non-invisible pout… so far, the best one has been Pixar’s THE INCREDIBLES. And now, Josh Trank (CHRONICLE) has released his own take on the group. To almost universal pandering. And then Josh went on Twitter to state that the studio had taken over his movie and ruined it.
Oh Josh, Josh, never piss where you eat.
Boasting an opening weekend less than THE LOVE GURU, FANTASTIC FOUR (or FANT4STIC FOUR, because that’s apparently cooler than just FANTASTIC FOUR), the movie will go down as this year’s turkey. But does it deserve that title? Does any non-Asylum movie deserve that title?
He’s trying to pirate HBO via the negative Zone…
It opens in a flashback to young prodigy Reed Richards (Owen Judge), who gets mocked by his teacher (Dan Castellaneta) for daring to want to make a teleporter (that’s what you get when Homer Simpson is your teacher); only Ben Grimm (Owen Judge) supports his dream (oh, and we learn the origin of The Thing’s catchphrase “It’s Clobbering Time!”, which according to the movie was what Ben’s older abusive brother would say before hitting him. Nice one, writers, very tasteful). We even see the prototype for the teleporter in Reed’s garage, because of course movie prodigies are always building amazing things out of spare parts in their garage. It’s Movie Law.
We fast-forward several years, when Reed gets played by Miles Teller and ben is played by Jamie Bell, when they get headhunted at their school science fair by Professor Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara). Professor Storm runs a government-funded facility for young prodigies, and in fact has been developing a similar teleporter to Reed’s, though they have to tell him it’s not just connecting to another place, it’s another dimension to a place they name as “Planet Zero”.
Don’t worry, the black guy isn’t gonna bite it in this one…
Their teleporter was started by, and then dropped, by a former prodigy, Latverian genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who went paranoid rogue that the US Government was going to weaponise his invention. As it happens, the Government, in the persona of evil spy Dr Allen (Tim Blake Nelson) proves him right, as they plan to send some NASA personnel over into the other dimension, which to be fair makes sense.
During a drunken binge with the gang, Von Doom points out that “everyone remembers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, not the underpaid scientists who sent them”, and so, following in the footsteps of Seth Brundle, they go off to visit Planet Zero while over the safe teleporting limit, leaving Sue behind to monitor the situation. There, they fall afoul of some Green Fluid, which engulfs Von Doom, seemingly killing him, and contaminates Reed, Ben and Johnny (Sue gets a dose of it on their return, like second-hand smoke).
The four of them are given the Area 51 treatment, with Reed escaping and the others agreeing to act as super soldiers for the military on the promise of being cured (yeah, sure). A year passes before Reed is recaptured, and assists the military in sending another team to gather some Green Fluid… only to find Doom waiting for them…
“Hard Rock Cafe, anyone?”
The thing about this movie is that it’s a passable horror/science fiction movie in its own right, with elements of Cronenbergian body horror; had Trask been given original characters, it would have been a decent THE FLY/PROMETHEUS knock-off. It just majorly sucks as a superhero movie. We get yet another shitty origin story, most of it takes place in an underground lab, they don’t get their powers until nearly an hour into a 90 minute movie, and the final inevitable showdown with Doom takes place in the last ten minutes! Both of the last two FF movies were streets closer in faithfulness to the original comic books.
Not that there aren’t problems with what we see. The script hits you over the head with the notion of how families have to stick together, but it’s lip service (again, the previous movies did a better job). The whole shift of an entire year in the movie may explain why they’ve learned to use their powers, but it’s jarring nonetheless. We see a scene where Reed is escaping the facility, he looks down and sees Ben Grimm in rocky form, promising to return for him. Later, Dr Allen visits Grimm, and the movie makes a big show of him stepping out of the shadows, as if it’s for the first time (also, he needs pants, I don’t need to know he has no wang to know he’s grumpy).
Doctor Doom, or Kabuki Man? You decide.
Surprisingly, Doom as a character comes off as more than passable (all that pre-production crap about making him an Internet blogger is thankfully nowhere to be seen), and you could actually take his point of view on more than one occasion. But then they give him superpowers too, because the idea of a villain who’s a super-genius sorcerer with Iron Man-level armour and is the ruler of his own country just makes him sound like a pussy.
It really isn’t a superhero movie. There’s no interaction with ordinary citizens, no rescues, barely any superheroics (we see some footage of the Thing taking on some tanks in a foreign country, and the Torch chasing some drones as part of his training, but there’s little more than that).
Artist Rob Liefield has been defending FANTASTIC FOUR, which I’m sure has nothing to do with contract he has with Sony over the DEADPOOL movie. But as much as I hate to be in the same camp as a man who’s made a fortune as an artist despite having fewer artistic skills than Helen Keller, I have to agree that it’s not the worst thing on film. Which proves that Damning With Faint Praise is my superpower…
Deggsy’s Summary:
Director: Josh Trank
Plot: 3 out of 5 stars
Gore: 4 out of 10 skulls
Zombie Mayhem: 0 out of 5 brains
Reviewed by Deggsy, aka Mr Fanatic
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[…] FANT4STIC FOUR: First of all, you’ve got that idiotic thing where a number is substituted for a letter or letters in the title, because it looks cool and hip, but in reality looks as dated and embarrassing like your grandfather trying to be cool as fuck (unless your grandfather is David Bowie, in which case he *is* cool as fuck). You’d think the premise would be fairly easy to pull off – they’re superheroes who are like a family – but somehow gets botched and muddled up. It’s not helped when you hand your multi-million dollar franchise to a man who only made one low-budget movie beforehand. When a shitty Roger Corman version ends up being more faithful to the source material, you know you’re fucked. […]
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Horror Movies, Horror News, Horror Reviews | AnythingHorror.com 
Great review, Deggsy!! I had heard from a few horror fans that FF makes a better horror/scifi flick with body horror elements than a straight up comic book movie. I’ll definitely check this one out when it hits VOD and other digital platforms.
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