We’ve all heard stories. We’ve all heard tell of this lumbering monster that took a gigantic steamy BM on 2015, but you all know me and how much I love experiencing this garbage for myself sooooo….
Fan4stic is the reboot of The Fantastic Four: Reed Richards (Elastigirl), Sue Storm (Violet), Johnny Storm (Jack Jack), and Ben Grimm (Mister Incredible). The old Fantastic Four movies weren’t that great (even though I’m one of the few on Earth who liked Rise of the Silver Surfer) and since rebooting is all the rage nowadays, it seems only logical to do.
That’s pretty much where the logic ends.
This time around, The Fantastic Four are younger — a bunch of meddling kids trying to unlock the secret to teleportation and, when they do, they get sent to a planet in another dimension or something where they set a series of events into motion… slowly into motion… that puts the entire Earth in danger from the nefarious and stupid-looking Doctor Victor Von Doom.
All right, how hard should it be to make a Fantastic Four movie work? The Batman and Robin goofy wise-cracking version didn’t work and the grim and gritty Dark Knight version doesn’t work either. Is it honestly so darned hard to just let these guys be comic book superheros? Not a cartoon and not a realistic take, but just a super hero team who is also a family? Why is it so hard?
I don’t mind changes to the source material if it makes sense or it makes the story work and, admittedly, changing the origin story to be a dimensional transport rather than a rocket to space, was pretty clever in my opinion… but Fan4stic is such a colossal miscalculation in every possible way, shifting the focus from fantasy to reality and from anything exciting to anything but.
Just to hammer my point home, Fan4stic manages to drag the opening of this movie out as long as possible… something it could have easily skipped over and been better for it, but as soon as the group gets their powers, it inexplicably skips over that! We’re told that The Thing is doing work for the government, but we never see it except in some distant news footage. We’re told that Sue and Johnny are working on their powers, but we see very little of that. Fan4stic seems determined to make us sit through what we don’t want to see!
As a side note, let me just say… I have no problem with Johnny Storm being black. None at all, but why couldn’t Sue be black too? Why did we have to insert this weird barely-referenced adoption story into an already laden film, when any number of black actresses could have taken the role?
Not that it would have made the movie better, I’m just saying.
The new Doctor Doom looks re-gosh-darn-diculous. Serious, someone signed off on this? His head-exploding powers are kinda neat, but he looks like a honked off C3PO and I just cannot take him seriously.
The ending is a mess. Doctor Doom is doing something because he hates the Earth or something and then… he’s dead and that’s it. I swear, it’s like everyone lost interest.
That’s the thing right there: No interest. It’s a superhero movie, but there’s little to no action in it. Nothing happens and, when it does, it’s in short unsatisfying tidbits that aren’t enough to feed your need. Call me crazy, but I think a primary component in any superhero movie should be… you know… movement.
When Stan Lee doesn’t cameo in the movie, you know there’s something wrong.
Seriously, it’s terrible, but I’ve seen way worse from 2015. The badness is undeniable, but it’s also exaggerated. Fan4stic does have a few clever ideas even if it doesn’t do anything with them, but that’s still more than can be said about other movies.
Jason Gaston 