Is The Thing meant to be the width of three people?
Of all the problems with 20th Century FOX’s third attempt at a Fantastic Four, the following seems most demonstrative of everyone not understanding what the fuck they’re doing: The Thing’s catchphrase is given an origin, and not just any origin. His older brother yells it before he beats the shit out of him, and that’s only stopped by Mama Grimm beating the shit out of the brother. Ben using it near the end of the movie bears the questionable undercurrent of abuse funneling into future violence. Fortunately, Sue doesn’t reclaim “I’ll slit your throat if you fucking scream, bitch!” as a catchphrase, nor is “flame on!” introduced as a homophobic slur. That the writers and director (who’s a co-writer) thought this was a good idea and put it in the final product shows their unsuitability in adapting the comic book series. It’s also in evidence in every other facet of this bucket of wank.
The movie derives inspiration mostly from Ultimate Fantastic Four, a retelling that made such brilliant changes as deaging everyone to teenagers, giving Reed Richards glasses (how else could you tell he’s smart?) and enrolling several of the characters into a super-science think tank. Said comic substituted the immaculate draftmanship and far out visuals of Kirby in favor of, uh, Greg Land tracing things from cumstained issues of Maxim. The film begins with Reed Richards (later played by Miles Teller, 21 & Over) and Ben Grimm (grows up to be Jamie Bell, Jumper) as 11 year olds who seek to build a “biomatter shuttle”, which is the hard sci-fi way of saying “teleporter”. Both come from shitty homes – Ben’s family owns a junkyard, so he literally lives in garbage, while Reed’s stepdad is Tim Heidecker, who portrays a spectacular alcoholic dad in his 30 seconds of screentime. (Alcoholic dad hallmark: wearing a cap of the team you’re watching on TV while sitting in the recliner. Although we never see him cracking a beer, come on, he’s a New York Jets fan. He has to be shitfaced most of the time, just as a coping mechanism.) After their first biomatter shuttle, powered by a couple dozen N64s, knocks out the neighborhood’s power, it’s not until seven years later at a school science fair that’s apparently open to all ages that they dare try it again. This time they destroy a backboard. Progress!
Fortunately for Reed, scienceish man Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, Oz) and his assistant/daughter Susan (Kate Mara, Iron Man 2) troll middle-through-high school science fairs in the hopes of finding geniuses. So he’s given a scholarship to science Hogwarts while Ben, who helped build the thing in the first place, is left to fuck off back to Garbageland. You would think the Baxter Foundation would be an easy means to introduce the other principal characters, yet still Franklin must bring both Victor Von Doom (clearly renamed from Victor Domashev in post in a doomed olive branch to the fans) and his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, That Awkward Moment) into the movie. Victor (Toby Kebbell, The Sorceror’s Apprentice) left the Baxter Foundation because he mistrusts the government involvement there, which is why he spends his time playing an Assassin’s Creed game using Google Glass and making sure no undue sunlight enters his masturbation bunker. No blogging, though! They scuttled THAT shit, leaving…uh… Johnny is a street racer (hence why he’s black; after Paul Walker, there are to be no more white street racers) who winds up in the emergency room and has to work for his dad in order to get his car back. He can’t get a car to work without fucking it up, surely he’s the best engineer for something that, multiple times, we’re reminded could end the world. Maybe the military should have more of a say, Franklin Storm’s a nepotistic fuck.
So little of this takes place outside I was hoping for them to leave their secret base only to find out it’s 6969 and the world is inhabited mainly by cockroaches and Duggars.
So after a few montages of supposed “character development” (Sue listens to Portishead! Johnny confers ethnic slurs like “Adolf” and “Borat” on Victor! Ben is ever closer to being in a Todd Solondz movie! Oh, are we having fun yet?) and hard sci-fi construction of a series of interconnected tanning beds, the Quantum Gate or Stargate or whatever the fuck is ready for use. They prove it by sending the animatic reel from Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the other dimension and back without complication. (Opportunity to introduce at least one Super Ape of Red Ghost And The wasted.) The exuberance is short lived, as Tim Blake Nelson tells the kids astronauts will be making the first trip, not a quartet of 18 year olds. Victor, Reed and Johnny get shitfaced on one flask of alcohol brand alcohol between them and decide to go themselves that night. But they need four people to do it. Do they ask Sue, who’s been just as much a part of the project as them? Nah, she might get menstrual blood all over the controls. Time to crowbar Ben Grimm back into the mix, who after dropping off Reed at Science University has only been shown reading text messages his buddy sent to him. Grimm’s the Ronnie Gardocki of this shitshow, a quiet, taciturn dude whose one mistake was trusting Reed Richards/Vic Mackey a day longer than he should’ve.
The trip to what’s dubbed Planet Zero, which looks like an inspiration starved hellplanet from any number of sci-fi shooter games, goes predictably awry in an unpredictable fashion as supposed genius Victor fingers a pool of the same green ooze used to animate Ryan Reynolds’ suit in Green Lantern. Thus, our first suspenseful sequence is actors struggling to rappel back to tanning booths in a rejected Metroid Prime level. Victor’s left behind and before the other three can close their booths, they get pelted with rocks, fire, etc. as explanation for why they get the powers they do. Sue? Well, she’s just hit by the shockwave of the gate returning to Earth. To reiterate, she doesn’t go on the adventure. Her role is to design their spacesuits and be on the computer while they’re adventuring, so she can troubleshoot while shit is going down. A comic book from 1961 is less sexist in its depiction of Sue Storm than a movie made in 2015. By the way, she’s the only female character in the movie with more than two lines of dialogue, but I’m sure you already suspected that.
In interviews with cast and crew the name “Cronenberg” and the word “Cronenbergian” have been bandied about a lot. As someone who wrote many a film course term paper on the man and his proclivity for body horror, I don’t see merit in the comparisons. To me it comes down to this: the kids get drunk and decide to try the machine themselves just like Seth Brundle got drunk and went through the telepod himself in The Fly. Whereas that made sense with who Brundle was, his relationship with Veronica and his hubris, this is just morons getting hammered. The film does contain body horror, but it’s brief and director Josh Trank never manages to personalize it. With Brundle’s transformation we see how he changes and how it affects his quality of life, his mental faculties and so on. Here we see Reed stretched out, and it looks painful, but then before you know it he’s escaped Area 57 (oh fuck youuuuuuu) and gone to Panama. Yeah, the movie sports an egregious “one year later” jump that skips over anyone learning to use their powers, cope with their new station in life, aka the things one might want in a protracted origin story like this is. Eh, fuck it, who wants to see Ben Grimn deal with being a hideous rock monster? Let’s have him kill 43 people in the Middle East! And let’s not even show that, too expensive and how dare there be “action” in this movie of torch men and stretchy men, just have it on monitors while Tim Blake Nelson chews and smacks some exposition gum.
Watch as Miles Teller stretches with the proportional pliability of an average man!
A better movie would use it as an illustration of how the military-industrial complex takes something fantastical and tries to weaponize it, but instead it’s halfassed, ill-considered bullshit like everything else in Fantastic Four. Sure, Johnny wants to use his powers to orphan Iranians! Why not! It’s not like I have any attachment to this version of the character; at best I have rapidly diminishing goodwill for Michael B. Jordan. (I actively had to remind myself of The Wire and Fruitvale Station during his fourth “you don’t get me, DAD!” scene.) There are about 1 to 1½ action sequences in the film, which would suggest the emphasis is on characterization, cast dynamics, etc. By the end of this 100 minute torture session, I don’t think Kate Mara and Jamie Bell have even had a conversation. Given that the Fantastic Four is about family, be it family you’re born into or family you choose, this is a pretty big fuckin’ misfire. In the comics they’re the First Family of the Marvel Universe and here they’re Some Acquaintances Who Tolerate Each Other I Guess Maybe. When Johnny calls Ben “a thing nobody wanted”, it’s not a friend making fun of another friend, it’s a stranger telling somebody he doesn’t know that he’s a monster who should fuck off somewhere else. I did wonder in the moment why Ben didn’t make him the Thing’s 44th confirmed kill; that reason why probably occurred in the second act the film never received.
In a scene demonstrating Sue’s genius (she remembers the protagonist of Reed’s favorite book, that he uses as his Internet name), she tracks down Richards, who’s cobbling together spare parts, using his stretching powers to look Hispanic in a reverse Jessica Alba situation and putting together a nice crazy wall collage of newspaper articles about the military’s covert ops huge rock monster. The military needs Reed to rebuild the tanning beds since apparently no one made schematics of what they built the first time around. Some army dudes go to Planet Shithole, where they find Victor, who in the intervening year has found a cloak/cape on a planet of uninhabitable green cum and garbage. Said green cum melted his spacesuit onto him so he resembles a combination of a crash test dummy and a partially melted action figure that an electrical current ejaculated all over. In a shocking 90 second feint, it turns out he wanted to be brought into military detention in yet another case of Fantastic Four repeating something many other, better movies have done in the past 5-10 years. See, Dr. Doom liked his planet of misery and gloom, IT WAS DARK LIKE HIS SOUL, DAD, so he came back to Earth solely to kill a bunch of military types so they don’t try to go back to Planet Zero. Then, because all superhero films need an apocalyptic climax, he something something hard sci-fi creates some pillars and sends a blue ray of energy to Earth, with the purpose of destroying that planet and powering Planet Zero…look, at this point I didn’t give a fuck about the plot anymore. It’s the climax of every bad sci-fi movie of the 90s you watched on a Saturday afternoon, nursing a massive hangover.
“Hey, uh, Josh, what are we supposed to be looking at?”
“Just some uninspired garbage the VFX guys slapped together over the weekend! Come on, Teller, you’ve done the franchise thing before!”
Dr. Doom, who’s only called that when Sue sarcastically retorts with “Dr. Doom over here” after Victor rants about how the previous generation fucked over the world and the environment and maybe Earth deserves to end (that isn’t even really a retort with his last name restored to ‘Von Doom’, she’s basically just saying ‘get a load of him, what if he ever gets a DOCTORATE’), sports opaque powers to match his opaque motivations. While Ben became a rock monster cause his pod was pelted by rocks, and Johnny’s was set on fire, spending a year on another planet gave Doom telekinesis and brain splosion abilities. In keeping with the hard sci-fi backing to this film, it’s not explained at all how or why he can do these things. The much remarked upon Cronenberg influence crops up again as Doom explodes a bunch of heads (like in a better movie than this!), including that of Tim Blake Nelson, whose character originally shared a civilian name with the Mole Man and then someone realized why the fuck name him after Mole Man if he’s being killed off and shares no similarities to the comic book character whatsoever. He saves the final brain popping for Dr. Storm, but it’s a charitable semi-brain popping, such that Reg E. Cathey can croak out some meaningless bullshit last words about “family” to his distraught-ish children in that delicious gravel tone of his. At this point in Fantastic Four I can’t tell where Kate Mara ends and her awful reshoot wig begins. I seriously think someone found Alba’s Rise of the Silver Surfer wig in a wardrobe room’s trash on the FOX lot and repurposed it. Mara may have actually done a worse job than Alba; while Alba looked grotesque as shit in wardrobe and makeup’s efforts to Aryan her up, she at least showed some investment. Kate Mara I think got paid in Valium prescriptions and is in a haze of “Remember when I was on House of Cards?” whenever the camera rolls.
Reed Richards the fearless leader who abandoned everyone for a year and made no progress in any of that time teaches the team to both be a team and appreciate teamwork with such woeful dialogue as “he’s not stronger than all of us” and so our heroes who’ve never been heroes fight a disfigured robot on a sound stage as bad special effects whirl around them. Barring a couple hilarious moments where they combat Doom throwing rocks at them by throwing rocks at him, and super genius Reed stretching to punch Professor Brain Explosion, it’s an incoherent, lifeless clusterfuck of a third act that appeals to no one and resolves nothing. I don’t know what the stakes are, why Doom can’t use his Scanners abilities anymore, whether the blonde mop on top of Kate Mara’s head is supposed to be an alien symbiote that will figure into Fantastic Four 2: Close for Comfort, I’m more concerned with the existential questions that come of the Thing having ass cheeks but no dong than whether or not these 29 year old teens save some town…of people…from destruction. Doom dies like an Eagleheart character. The day is saved and I’m spitting bile into my popcorn bucket.
He’d totally roll his eyes at you if his eyeballs weren’t melted onto his face in a glue gun accident gone horribly wrong.
If forced to pick one element I enjoyed the most from this mess, it would be that Dr. Doom is the secret hero of the picture. Hear me out. He Scanners the entire rung of the military-industrial complex that have the Fantastic Four under the thumb of the United States government, effectively freeing them from that involuntary servitude. This accomplished, he creates an apocalyptic scenario that forces four people who barely tolerate each other to work together as a team that also is a public, readily apparent victory that gives the FF a favorable bargaining position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were worse off before Doom left The Astrodome If It Became A Planet than after. While this is amusing to consider, it’s an indictment of the movie’s story if the intermittent antagonist drives the plot and decides the fate of characters more so than those comprising the fucking title. The US government caves to the FF’s demands of spacious labs and no oversight because the Thing grunts, intimating that if they don’t cede to the teens the Thing will add to his kill count. Ben Grimm’s rocky exterior covered in what used to be Martin Dempsey would be an interesting end to a would-be summer tentpole, I will admit. That is the story of how the United States government gave away an office park called Central City, get it because it’s a reference to the original comics that adds FUCKING NOTHING, and the film closes on them deciding what to call themselves. A Fantastic Four movie in which no one could be bothered to say the words “Fantastic Four”. Jesus.
The thing is, even if I had no opinion about the Fantastic Four as a comic, as characters, as a concept, this still would be a shitty movie serving too many masters and pleasing no one. Everyone is underdeveloped, at best receiving one trait that is emphasized over and over (Sue listens to music to concentrate! Victor hates the military industrial complex!). 98% of the movie takes place on a soundstage host to unimaginative and poorly rendered visual effects or a series of dreary hallways. It’s easily the ugliest looking Fantastic Four, and the other ones have aged effects to deal with. Of the actors, Michael B. Jordan embarrasses himself the least (I never understood why racists had a problem with a black man with the power to be set on fire), with Reg E. Cathey looking closest to giving a shit. A combination of bad writing and general disinterest see Miles Teller and Kate Mara give phoned in performances and Jamie Bell becomes a CGI whatever well before he gives any soul to Ben Grimm. It’s hard to fault the actors for not giving a shit because it seems like no one gave a shit. Not FOX, not the pothead director, no one.
I could easily spend another 1000-2000 words on things that bug, irritate and annoy me about this film, but neither of us have all day, so I’ll limit myself to just a few things that can’t be left unremarked upon. Like the Tim Story iterations, Doom has a one-sided crush on Sue Storm that seems to keep on making it into Fantastic Four movies because idiots can’t imagine two men having a rivalry that didn’t include a woman. Neither Toby Kebbell nor Kate Mara tries a European accent despite both of their characters being Eastern European. (Sue’s supposedly of Kosovo extraction, which I don’t believe for a second because Kate Mara cannot play anything but the whitest of white people, a white so white if you look at her too long you’ll go blind. I am happy an African-American man can adopt a conflict baby too – we’ve come so far in this country.) You could make a cut, with minimal changes, that desibling Sue and Johnny. You could also make a cut that replaces Jamie Bell with a loyal hound dog. No one has any chemistry with each other, their performances happening like they were pieced together in a lab. There’s a theme about the promise of youth correcting the mistakes of the past generation that goes nowhere. It’s apparent Fantastic Four 2015 was a troubled production, whole scenes present in the marketing unaccounted for in the final product, the editing shoddy enough that the thing feels like it’s held together by chewing gum. The spare to nonexistent second and third acts make it barely feel like a movie.
Occasionally a contractual obligation will create something of artistic merit, but more often than not something such as Fantastic Four 2015 happens. On no level does it succeed at what it’s trying to do (gut a comic book property and make Chronicle 2 out of its carcass), unless you consider “didn’t kill everyone who laid eyes on it” a level. Thankfully, the foghorn of critical reviews and the tepid box office take make it almost a guarantee this stupid version of the characters will be left on the verge of coming up with their own team name, the sequel ushered to the farm upstate where it’ll be happier. Green Lantern 2 will have a new friend to play with! I only hope Marvel regains the film rights to the characters and makes a safe boilerplate film with all the visual flair of an episode of Royal Pains so the characters won’t be sidelined in the comics anymore.
No Marvel is not petty at all about FOX owning rights to the Fantastic Four, that a Punisher comic depicted the film’s cast dying a fiery death is a COINCIDENCE GODDAMNIT
Fantastic Four 2015: Cheaper Looking Than A Corman
Is The Thing meant to be the width of three people?
Of all the problems with 20th Century FOX’s third attempt at a Fantastic Four, the following seems most demonstrative of everyone not understanding what the fuck they’re doing: The Thing’s catchphrase is given an origin, and not just any origin. His older brother yells it before he beats the shit out of him, and that’s only stopped by Mama Grimm beating the shit out of the brother. Ben using it near the end of the movie bears the questionable undercurrent of abuse funneling into future violence. Fortunately, Sue doesn’t reclaim “I’ll slit your throat if you fucking scream, bitch!” as a catchphrase, nor is “flame on!” introduced as a homophobic slur. That the writers and director (who’s a co-writer) thought this was a good idea and put it in the final product shows their unsuitability in adapting the comic book series. It’s also in evidence in every other facet of this bucket of wank.
The movie derives inspiration mostly from Ultimate Fantastic Four, a retelling that made such brilliant changes as deaging everyone to teenagers, giving Reed Richards glasses (how else could you tell he’s smart?) and enrolling several of the characters into a super-science think tank. Said comic substituted the immaculate draftmanship and far out visuals of Kirby in favor of, uh, Greg Land tracing things from cumstained issues of Maxim. The film begins with Reed Richards (later played by Miles Teller, 21 & Over) and Ben Grimm (grows up to be Jamie Bell, Jumper) as 11 year olds who seek to build a “biomatter shuttle”, which is the hard sci-fi way of saying “teleporter”. Both come from shitty homes – Ben’s family owns a junkyard, so he literally lives in garbage, while Reed’s stepdad is Tim Heidecker, who portrays a spectacular alcoholic dad in his 30 seconds of screentime. (Alcoholic dad hallmark: wearing a cap of the team you’re watching on TV while sitting in the recliner. Although we never see him cracking a beer, come on, he’s a New York Jets fan. He has to be shitfaced most of the time, just as a coping mechanism.) After their first biomatter shuttle, powered by a couple dozen N64s, knocks out the neighborhood’s power, it’s not until seven years later at a school science fair that’s apparently open to all ages that they dare try it again. This time they destroy a backboard. Progress!
Fortunately for Reed, scienceish man Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, Oz) and his assistant/daughter Susan (Kate Mara, Iron Man 2) troll middle-through-high school science fairs in the hopes of finding geniuses. So he’s given a scholarship to science Hogwarts while Ben, who helped build the thing in the first place, is left to fuck off back to Garbageland. You would think the Baxter Foundation would be an easy means to introduce the other principal characters, yet still Franklin must bring both Victor Von Doom (clearly renamed from Victor Domashev in post in a doomed olive branch to the fans) and his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, That Awkward Moment) into the movie. Victor (Toby Kebbell, The Sorceror’s Apprentice) left the Baxter Foundation because he mistrusts the government involvement there, which is why he spends his time playing an Assassin’s Creed game using Google Glass and making sure no undue sunlight enters his masturbation bunker. No blogging, though! They scuttled THAT shit, leaving…uh… Johnny is a street racer (hence why he’s black; after Paul Walker, there are to be no more white street racers) who winds up in the emergency room and has to work for his dad in order to get his car back. He can’t get a car to work without fucking it up, surely he’s the best engineer for something that, multiple times, we’re reminded could end the world. Maybe the military should have more of a say, Franklin Storm’s a nepotistic fuck.
So little of this takes place outside I was hoping for them to leave their secret base only to find out it’s 6969 and the world is inhabited mainly by cockroaches and Duggars.
So after a few montages of supposed “character development” (Sue listens to Portishead! Johnny confers ethnic slurs like “Adolf” and “Borat” on Victor! Ben is ever closer to being in a Todd Solondz movie! Oh, are we having fun yet?) and hard sci-fi construction of a series of interconnected tanning beds, the Quantum Gate or Stargate or whatever the fuck is ready for use. They prove it by sending the animatic reel from Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the other dimension and back without complication. (Opportunity to introduce at least one Super Ape of Red Ghost And The wasted.) The exuberance is short lived, as Tim Blake Nelson tells the kids astronauts will be making the first trip, not a quartet of 18 year olds. Victor, Reed and Johnny get shitfaced on one flask of alcohol brand alcohol between them and decide to go themselves that night. But they need four people to do it. Do they ask Sue, who’s been just as much a part of the project as them? Nah, she might get menstrual blood all over the controls. Time to crowbar Ben Grimm back into the mix, who after dropping off Reed at Science University has only been shown reading text messages his buddy sent to him. Grimm’s the Ronnie Gardocki of this shitshow, a quiet, taciturn dude whose one mistake was trusting Reed Richards/Vic Mackey a day longer than he should’ve.
The trip to what’s dubbed Planet Zero, which looks like an inspiration starved hellplanet from any number of sci-fi shooter games, goes predictably awry in an unpredictable fashion as supposed genius Victor fingers a pool of the same green ooze used to animate Ryan Reynolds’ suit in Green Lantern. Thus, our first suspenseful sequence is actors struggling to rappel back to tanning booths in a rejected Metroid Prime level. Victor’s left behind and before the other three can close their booths, they get pelted with rocks, fire, etc. as explanation for why they get the powers they do. Sue? Well, she’s just hit by the shockwave of the gate returning to Earth. To reiterate, she doesn’t go on the adventure. Her role is to design their spacesuits and be on the computer while they’re adventuring, so she can troubleshoot while shit is going down. A comic book from 1961 is less sexist in its depiction of Sue Storm than a movie made in 2015. By the way, she’s the only female character in the movie with more than two lines of dialogue, but I’m sure you already suspected that.
In interviews with cast and crew the name “Cronenberg” and the word “Cronenbergian” have been bandied about a lot. As someone who wrote many a film course term paper on the man and his proclivity for body horror, I don’t see merit in the comparisons. To me it comes down to this: the kids get drunk and decide to try the machine themselves just like Seth Brundle got drunk and went through the telepod himself in The Fly. Whereas that made sense with who Brundle was, his relationship with Veronica and his hubris, this is just morons getting hammered. The film does contain body horror, but it’s brief and director Josh Trank never manages to personalize it. With Brundle’s transformation we see how he changes and how it affects his quality of life, his mental faculties and so on. Here we see Reed stretched out, and it looks painful, but then before you know it he’s escaped Area 57 (oh fuck youuuuuuu) and gone to Panama. Yeah, the movie sports an egregious “one year later” jump that skips over anyone learning to use their powers, cope with their new station in life, aka the things one might want in a protracted origin story like this is. Eh, fuck it, who wants to see Ben Grimn deal with being a hideous rock monster? Let’s have him kill 43 people in the Middle East! And let’s not even show that, too expensive and how dare there be “action” in this movie of torch men and stretchy men, just have it on monitors while Tim Blake Nelson chews and smacks some exposition gum.
Watch as Miles Teller stretches with the proportional pliability of an average man!
A better movie would use it as an illustration of how the military-industrial complex takes something fantastical and tries to weaponize it, but instead it’s halfassed, ill-considered bullshit like everything else in Fantastic Four. Sure, Johnny wants to use his powers to orphan Iranians! Why not! It’s not like I have any attachment to this version of the character; at best I have rapidly diminishing goodwill for Michael B. Jordan. (I actively had to remind myself of The Wire and Fruitvale Station during his fourth “you don’t get me, DAD!” scene.) There are about 1 to 1½ action sequences in the film, which would suggest the emphasis is on characterization, cast dynamics, etc. By the end of this 100 minute torture session, I don’t think Kate Mara and Jamie Bell have even had a conversation. Given that the Fantastic Four is about family, be it family you’re born into or family you choose, this is a pretty big fuckin’ misfire. In the comics they’re the First Family of the Marvel Universe and here they’re Some Acquaintances Who Tolerate Each Other I Guess Maybe. When Johnny calls Ben “a thing nobody wanted”, it’s not a friend making fun of another friend, it’s a stranger telling somebody he doesn’t know that he’s a monster who should fuck off somewhere else. I did wonder in the moment why Ben didn’t make him the Thing’s 44th confirmed kill; that reason why probably occurred in the second act the film never received.
In a scene demonstrating Sue’s genius (she remembers the protagonist of Reed’s favorite book, that he uses as his Internet name), she tracks down Richards, who’s cobbling together spare parts, using his stretching powers to look Hispanic in a reverse Jessica Alba situation and putting together a nice crazy wall collage of newspaper articles about the military’s covert ops huge rock monster. The military needs Reed to rebuild the tanning beds since apparently no one made schematics of what they built the first time around. Some army dudes go to Planet Shithole, where they find Victor, who in the intervening year has found a cloak/cape on a planet of uninhabitable green cum and garbage. Said green cum melted his spacesuit onto him so he resembles a combination of a crash test dummy and a partially melted action figure that an electrical current ejaculated all over. In a shocking 90 second feint, it turns out he wanted to be brought into military detention in yet another case of Fantastic Four repeating something many other, better movies have done in the past 5-10 years. See, Dr. Doom liked his planet of misery and gloom, IT WAS DARK LIKE HIS SOUL, DAD, so he came back to Earth solely to kill a bunch of military types so they don’t try to go back to Planet Zero. Then, because all superhero films need an apocalyptic climax, he something something hard sci-fi creates some pillars and sends a blue ray of energy to Earth, with the purpose of destroying that planet and powering Planet Zero…look, at this point I didn’t give a fuck about the plot anymore. It’s the climax of every bad sci-fi movie of the 90s you watched on a Saturday afternoon, nursing a massive hangover.
“Hey, uh, Josh, what are we supposed to be looking at?”
“Just some uninspired garbage the VFX guys slapped together over the weekend! Come on, Teller, you’ve done the franchise thing before!”
Dr. Doom, who’s only called that when Sue sarcastically retorts with “Dr. Doom over here” after Victor rants about how the previous generation fucked over the world and the environment and maybe Earth deserves to end (that isn’t even really a retort with his last name restored to ‘Von Doom’, she’s basically just saying ‘get a load of him, what if he ever gets a DOCTORATE’), sports opaque powers to match his opaque motivations. While Ben became a rock monster cause his pod was pelted by rocks, and Johnny’s was set on fire, spending a year on another planet gave Doom telekinesis and brain splosion abilities. In keeping with the hard sci-fi backing to this film, it’s not explained at all how or why he can do these things. The much remarked upon Cronenberg influence crops up again as Doom explodes a bunch of heads (like in a better movie than this!), including that of Tim Blake Nelson, whose character originally shared a civilian name with the Mole Man and then someone realized why the fuck name him after Mole Man if he’s being killed off and shares no similarities to the comic book character whatsoever. He saves the final brain popping for Dr. Storm, but it’s a charitable semi-brain popping, such that Reg E. Cathey can croak out some meaningless bullshit last words about “family” to his distraught-ish children in that delicious gravel tone of his. At this point in Fantastic Four I can’t tell where Kate Mara ends and her awful reshoot wig begins. I seriously think someone found Alba’s Rise of the Silver Surfer wig in a wardrobe room’s trash on the FOX lot and repurposed it. Mara may have actually done a worse job than Alba; while Alba looked grotesque as shit in wardrobe and makeup’s efforts to Aryan her up, she at least showed some investment. Kate Mara I think got paid in Valium prescriptions and is in a haze of “Remember when I was on House of Cards?” whenever the camera rolls.
Reed Richards the fearless leader who abandoned everyone for a year and made no progress in any of that time teaches the team to both be a team and appreciate teamwork with such woeful dialogue as “he’s not stronger than all of us” and so our heroes who’ve never been heroes fight a disfigured robot on a sound stage as bad special effects whirl around them. Barring a couple hilarious moments where they combat Doom throwing rocks at them by throwing rocks at him, and super genius Reed stretching to punch Professor Brain Explosion, it’s an incoherent, lifeless clusterfuck of a third act that appeals to no one and resolves nothing. I don’t know what the stakes are, why Doom can’t use his Scanners abilities anymore, whether the blonde mop on top of Kate Mara’s head is supposed to be an alien symbiote that will figure into Fantastic Four 2: Close for Comfort, I’m more concerned with the existential questions that come of the Thing having ass cheeks but no dong than whether or not these 29 year old teens save some town…of people…from destruction. Doom dies like an Eagleheart character. The day is saved and I’m spitting bile into my popcorn bucket.
He’d totally roll his eyes at you if his eyeballs weren’t melted onto his face in a glue gun accident gone horribly wrong.
If forced to pick one element I enjoyed the most from this mess, it would be that Dr. Doom is the secret hero of the picture. Hear me out. He Scanners the entire rung of the military-industrial complex that have the Fantastic Four under the thumb of the United States government, effectively freeing them from that involuntary servitude. This accomplished, he creates an apocalyptic scenario that forces four people who barely tolerate each other to work together as a team that also is a public, readily apparent victory that gives the FF a favorable bargaining position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were worse off before Doom left The Astrodome If It Became A Planet than after. While this is amusing to consider, it’s an indictment of the movie’s story if the intermittent antagonist drives the plot and decides the fate of characters more so than those comprising the fucking title. The US government caves to the FF’s demands of spacious labs and no oversight because the Thing grunts, intimating that if they don’t cede to the teens the Thing will add to his kill count. Ben Grimm’s rocky exterior covered in what used to be Martin Dempsey would be an interesting end to a would-be summer tentpole, I will admit. That is the story of how the United States government gave away an office park called Central City, get it because it’s a reference to the original comics that adds FUCKING NOTHING, and the film closes on them deciding what to call themselves. A Fantastic Four movie in which no one could be bothered to say the words “Fantastic Four”. Jesus.
The thing is, even if I had no opinion about the Fantastic Four as a comic, as characters, as a concept, this still would be a shitty movie serving too many masters and pleasing no one. Everyone is underdeveloped, at best receiving one trait that is emphasized over and over (Sue listens to music to concentrate! Victor hates the military industrial complex!). 98% of the movie takes place on a soundstage host to unimaginative and poorly rendered visual effects or a series of dreary hallways. It’s easily the ugliest looking Fantastic Four, and the other ones have aged effects to deal with. Of the actors, Michael B. Jordan embarrasses himself the least (I never understood why racists had a problem with a black man with the power to be set on fire), with Reg E. Cathey looking closest to giving a shit. A combination of bad writing and general disinterest see Miles Teller and Kate Mara give phoned in performances and Jamie Bell becomes a CGI whatever well before he gives any soul to Ben Grimm. It’s hard to fault the actors for not giving a shit because it seems like no one gave a shit. Not FOX, not the pothead director, no one.
I could easily spend another 1000-2000 words on things that bug, irritate and annoy me about this film, but neither of us have all day, so I’ll limit myself to just a few things that can’t be left unremarked upon. Like the Tim Story iterations, Doom has a one-sided crush on Sue Storm that seems to keep on making it into Fantastic Four movies because idiots can’t imagine two men having a rivalry that didn’t include a woman. Neither Toby Kebbell nor Kate Mara tries a European accent despite both of their characters being Eastern European. (Sue’s supposedly of Kosovo extraction, which I don’t believe for a second because Kate Mara cannot play anything but the whitest of white people, a white so white if you look at her too long you’ll go blind. I am happy an African-American man can adopt a conflict baby too – we’ve come so far in this country.) You could make a cut, with minimal changes, that desibling Sue and Johnny. You could also make a cut that replaces Jamie Bell with a loyal hound dog. No one has any chemistry with each other, their performances happening like they were pieced together in a lab. There’s a theme about the promise of youth correcting the mistakes of the past generation that goes nowhere. It’s apparent Fantastic Four 2015 was a troubled production, whole scenes present in the marketing unaccounted for in the final product, the editing shoddy enough that the thing feels like it’s held together by chewing gum. The spare to nonexistent second and third acts make it barely feel like a movie.
Occasionally a contractual obligation will create something of artistic merit, but more often than not something such as Fantastic Four 2015 happens. On no level does it succeed at what it’s trying to do (gut a comic book property and make Chronicle 2 out of its carcass), unless you consider “didn’t kill everyone who laid eyes on it” a level. Thankfully, the foghorn of critical reviews and the tepid box office take make it almost a guarantee this stupid version of the characters will be left on the verge of coming up with their own team name, the sequel ushered to the farm upstate where it’ll be happier. Green Lantern 2 will have a new friend to play with! I only hope Marvel regains the film rights to the characters and makes a safe boilerplate film with all the visual flair of an episode of Royal Pains so the characters won’t be sidelined in the comics anymore.
No Marvel is not petty at all about FOX owning rights to the Fantastic Four, that a Punisher comic depicted the film’s cast dying a fiery death is a COINCIDENCE GODDAMNIT
Ronnie Gardocki
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