Fantastic Four is the type of film that really pisses film critics off. It's horrible, trite, and here's the kicker, just the boring kind. This means that we have to sit through a horrible and trite film, but also when we walk out of it, we have to deal with the fact that there is literally nothing interesting to say about it. That is worse than anything. Heck, that might even be worse then Pixels. Fantastic Four is a retelling of the origin of Marvel's Fantastic Four. Well, it's less a retelling than what happens when someone chops up the story, adds a good dose of unnecessary and gritty realism, and then throws out any resemblance of three act structure. These are shallow characters only showing us how their world works in boring ways. I hate to steal from other critics, but this is a film of exposition. All of it could be the first act of a bigger, but probably not better film, seeing how shitty all of this was. And you know what happens when your movie is just a first act? It's boring. There's no investment. There's nothing to latch onto, and make a good movie out of, and unfortunately that's just what happens here. It doesn't help that the entire thing is really, really, shallow with most of the characters meeting and becoming friends through a montage. That's just lazy, and with the horrible story structure, you can't afford to be lazy. It might have worked too, if the actors would just sell it, but they don't. Yes, Miles Teller is good in Whiplash, and The Spectacular Now, but here he's back to playing a smug douchebag type character he played in Project X, and That Awkward Moment, so there's a waste. Reed Richards is supposed to be smart not insulting The THING! Kate Mara isn't even worth mentioning because she's only around for a few minutes, and Michael B. Jordon just seems lost in a script he can't really get into. The only one with a relative amount of charisma might be Jamie Bell as The Thing, but that's only because he plays the whole "HOLY SHIT I'VE TURNED INTO A ROCK MONSTER!" pretty good in the couple of lines he's given to talk about it. All the acting doesn't really matter though, because we don't care about the characters. This is them in Act 1, so they don't really matter. But the film honestly thinks that there's enough stuff in there to make a climax out of. The film (I hate to sound like a broken record) seeing how it feels like a first act jarringly jumps to it's climax without really giving the audience time to realize it's happening. In my theatre seat, I was wondering why it took so little time to get there, and whether or not it really was the climax because I hadn't seen any indicators of that yet. The action isn't even good. The film seems to want to get you out of the theatre as quick as possible so you don't realize how much of a clustercuss (Fantastic Mr. Fox anyone) the entire thing is so the action scenes take like 2 minutes, and feel unfinished. I was really disappointed in these, seeing how the director, Josh Trank, squeezed so much thrilling action out of the found footage battle at the end of Chronicle. He could do it with that film, but not with this one? It also doesn't help that the CGI looks horrid. I was sitting in the theatre during a sequence of The Human Torch flying, and thought I was watching a low rent CGI animated film... then I shuddered at the fact that I was. Fantastic Four is a disaster. Nothing about it really works. EVERYTHING IS SO DULL, AND BORING. NOTHING STICKS, BUT I DON'T WANT IT TO. THIS IS THE WORST FILM OF THE YEAR. I give Fantastic Four a 1.5 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |