Who’s More Bored By The New ‘Fantastic Four’: The Audience, Or The Cast?

The day someone tallied the full slate of superhero movies set for release through to the year 2020 was a depressing one indeed.

Not so much because “all Hollywood makes now is superhero movies” (patently not true, though the PR machine for each installment is so deafening you could be forgiven for thinking as much), but because if the last few offerings have been anything to go by, superhero filmmaking is utterly uninterested in those tiresome concepts like “plot”, “characterisation” and “new ideas”. Despite this, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become a force to be reckoned with.

(A brief primer on who owns who in the MCU: 20th Century Fox own X-Men and Fantastic Four, which also gives them Deadpool and Silver Surfer; Sony Pictures owns Spider-Man; Universal enjoys “first right of refusal” to any stand-alone Hulk movies, even though Disney now owns the best of the rest of Marvel’s characters, including the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and the Inhumans. Marvel Studios is a subsidiary of Marvel Entertainment, which was acquired by Disney in 2009. Phew.)

Such are the collective lowered expectations of humanity that Marvel Studios’ Guardians Of The Galaxy — a middling-at-best space adventure with a shoehorned-on classic hits soundtrack — was celebrated as though it were truly subversive. Likewise, its Avengers: Age Of Ultron was a bore.

And now, with Fantastic Four (excuse me, Fant4stic) as evidence, 2020 looks even further away.

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Hope You Weren’t Expecting A Plot

The film begins with some of the worst acting by children since The Omen, as young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) and Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann) attempt to put together a backyard teleporter using junk and N64 controllers. I’m not sure whether it’s FF canon that Richards and Grimm were comatose throughout their childhood, but these performances suggest as much.

Flash forward and Richards (now Miles Teller) and Grimm (now Jamie Bell) have ironed out some of the creases in their device, and present it at a science fair. This catches the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Susan (Kate Mara), and Storm instantly gives Richards a “full scholarship” to The Baxter Foundation in New York, a school for scientifically talented young people who move through its halls in reverential slow motion.

After a brief street racing sequence in order to demonstrate that Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) is a tearaway who needs to earn his father’s respect, Dr. Storm puts his kids and Richards to work on completing the “Quantum Gate” begun by Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). We know that Victor is bad news because he plays first person shooter games using a new-fangled Power Glove while listening to classical music.

With Victor back on board, the Gate is quickly finished, and Shifty Government Dude (Tim Blake Nelson, perpetually chewing gum) insists that NASA will come aboard for the first flight to a parallel dimension. Disappointed, Richards and his friends get drunk on ethanol, invite Grimm to the lab for shits, and decide to go for an interdimensional joyride to a place that looks like a high end World Of Warcraft zone made of key lime self-saucing pudding.

Bad stuff happens.

The End.

…

Well, it’s not really “The End”, but so little happens in Fantastic Four that it might as well be. Victor is left behind on “Planet Zero”, and apparently nobody cares, while the other four return with their famous and Fantastic powers: Susan can go invisible (and float around in a bubble like Glinda The Good Witch), Johnny becomes The Human Torch, Grimm becomes mopey rock monster Thing, and Richards becomes the bendy, stretchy Mr Fantastic. Naturally, since Chronicle director Josh Trank’s take on Fantastic Four is Very Serious, none of them go by their fun comic book names here.

There is a brief and enjoyable body horror sequence involving Richards’ now wormlike body slinking down an air-conditioner shaft, but we’re not even treated to a “putting the gang together” montage: instead, the story jumps forward another year, and we get Nelson filling us in on the exposition care of a presentation to some military types.

Superpowers seem, with the possible exception of Johnny’s, to be an absolute pain in the ass. There’s too much exposition where it’s not needed, and precious little intel where it is; there’s no explanation as to why, for example, Richards makes himself a DIY suit that looks like a cross between Starlight Express and a cut-rate Edward Scissorhands costume.

When Victor eventually reappears, in his (again, un-named) Dr Doom form, he wanders around dispatching anonymous grunts a la Scanners. You may find yourself wishing he’d do the same to you.

It’s Not Just Joyless; It’s Borderline Amateur

The special effects range from mildly diverting to shonky, and the inevitable climactic interdimensional rift isn’t anything we haven’t already seen in Man Of Steel, Avengers or Thor: The Dark World (though seeing Kebbell’s Doom Vogueing around it like he’s in a YouTube street dance compilation is entertaining).

Even the score, by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass, doesn’t seem to know what to do, occasionally firing up with some nice Glassisms before retreating into the background as though the sheet music annotations said “forget about it” instead of “fortissimo”.

Whatever freshness Trank brought to Chronicle, which was presumably what got him this gig, has been snuffed out. Which begs the question: why do studios continue to hire new talent for superhero movies? They’re clearly utterly uninterested in anything that isn’t “on brand”, so they might as well just hire people who put together corporate training videos and save themselves some money.

It’s not that Fantastic Four is joyless (save for brief evidence of Johnny Storm having enjoyed the pastries laid out by some government types at a conference table); it’s that it’s borderline amateur. Dialogue is stilted, story is nonexistent, and Trank has assembled a cast of some of the finest young actors around and made them seem as engaging as subpar John Wayne impersonators.

Only Jordan, who makes his Johnny Storm a likeable rogue, escapes with his reputation intact. Teller, meanwhile, appears to spend the entire film succumbing to a large dose of Ambien, occasionally waking up to bark something expository like “We opened this door, we’re gonna close it”, while Mara just listens to Portishead while staring at computers. Judging by his vacant eyes, Bell appears to have astral travelled to a different, better movie.

It’s not until the final seconds of the film that this bunch of wooden idiots comes up with the eponymous team name, by which point the audience at my screening was groaning and hooting in equal measure. A sequel is already scheduled for release in June of 2017. Why?

Before he steals the teleporter and pops over to Planet Zero, Richards is asked, “You want to be famous?” He replies: “I just want my work to make a difference.”

In your dreams, son.

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Fantastic Four is out now around Australia.

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Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic. She’s on Twitter at @clembastow