Movie review: ‘Fantastic Four’

Hollywood is littered with the broken dreams of hotshot indie directors whose first attempt at a big-budget, special-effects-saturated blockbuster is a bust. Neill Blomkamp (Elysium), Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead remake), and Jose Padilha (RoboCop reboot) come to mind. Now, add Josh Trank to the list.

Three years ago, his sci-fi thriller Chronicle earned raves and a cult following. That’s not going to happen with his take on Fantastic Four, a plodding retelling of the Marvel Comics characters’ origin story. Everyone involved seems to be just punching the clock until payday.

The film starts in 2007, when grade-schooler and amateur inventor Reed Richards (Owen Judge) regales his class with plans to build a machine that can transport matter in an instant.

Flash-forward a few years and Reed (now played by Miles Teller) and his best friend, Ben (Jamie Bell), are presenting the finished product at a science fair. While the rudimentary device — held together with spit and hope — doesn’t work smoothly, it does make a toy plane disappear and re-appear.

Watching it all is scientist Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted, adult daughter, Sue (Kate Mara), whose team has been working on the same idea but with no luck.

Reed is recruited to work with the Storms, including son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and reclusive Victor (Toby Kebbell), the young scientist who had spearheaded the Storms’ efforts but had little to show for it. Needless to say, he’s not happy with the young interloper.

Still, they work together and manage to send a monkey through a portal into another dimension — and bring it back. But they can’t celebrate their victory too long as the corporate powers-that-be, in the form of Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), want to turn everything over to NASA, robbing our heroes of the credit.

So, they decide to go through the portal themselves to plant an American flag to prove they were there. Bad idea.

But the cataclysm does turn them into what the audience has to wait what feels like an eternity to see: superheroes with super powers.

Reed is Mr. Fantastic, who can stretch like a rubber band; Johnny is the Human Torch, who can turn himself into flame; Sue is the Invisible Woman, who can make herself unseen and create force fields; and Ben is The Thing, who’s a ferociously strong creature sculpted from stone.

Meanwhile, Victor mutates into the evil nemesis Dr. Doom, bent on destroying whatever is on humanity’s side of the portal.

If all of this sounds like mindless, summer-movie fun, it’s not. The performances are serviceable, there’s a handful of decent effects — Johnny’s elongating, rubber limbs among them — and having the Storms be a racially blended family is a cool nod to the 21st century. (There was much Internet consternation when it was announced that African-American Jordan would be playing The Human Torch.)

But these elements are not enough to counterbalance the talky, flat, and generally humorless script that Trank wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater. (Kinberg wrote the superior X-Men: Days of Future Past so he definitely should know better.)

It seems as if Trank may have wanted to make a darker film that flouts superhero movie expectations and doesn’t tread the same ground the last Fantastic Four movies did in 2005 and 2007. That’s fine, but dark doesn’t have to mean dull.

Fantastic Four also isn’t particularly kid-friendly. In addition to the long lead time before much happens, the scene of heads exploding inside their space suits may be too graphic for some younger viewers.

Last year at this time, Marvel gave us the highly entertaining Guardians of the Galaxy, sparking talk that — contrary to long-held Hollywood wisdom — action movies released in August didn’t have to be the rejects that weren’t good enough to see the light of day earlier in the summer.

Now, they’re giving us the dreary Fantastic Four.

It looks like Hollywood was right after all.

This story was originally published August 6, 2015 at 8:46 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Fantastic Four’."