Movie Review: 'Fantastic Four'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A team of astronauts teleports to an alternate universe, gaining four unique supertalents, and still fails to win us over.
Thus does Fantastic Four fall far short of fantasticness.
Again.
This Fantastic Four is a redo of 2005's Fantastic Four (which was followed in 2007 by Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer), a Marvel Comics-inspired fantasy about a freakish occurrence during which a team of astronauts passes through a DNA-altering cloud, receiving a dose of cosmic radiation during their interdimensional-travel experiment that genetically transforms them.
Miles Teller as Reed Richard gains elasticity as Mr. Fantastic; brother and sister Johnny and Sue Storm, played by Michael B. Jordan and Kate Mara, become the Human Torch and Invisible Woman, respectively; and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm becomes an orange-ish rock creature called The Thing.
And you thought your high school friends were weird.
Josh Trank earned the directorial gig with his nifty sleeper hit, Chronicle, a 2012 found-footage thriller that chronicled the ups and downs of teens who accidentally acquire otherworldly superskills – just as does the crew here.
In the early reels, Trank gives us a dark and absorbing buildup that recalls his Chronicle and gives us hope that he will not take the generic road. But the film's second half is right off the assembly line.
The script by Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, from a story by Kinberg and Trank, deals with the four friends, each now empowered and temporarily quarantined, thus harnessing their newfound abilities as they oppose an ex-colleague-turned-megalomaniacal-nemesis, called Dr. Doom, who threatens Earth itself unless the title quartet can stop him.
Well, you knew he wasn't going to just hold up gas stations.
The four focal characters have identity problems and so do the young actors playing them, who are not able to lend their characters sufficient color or charisma to make their adventure compelling.
As for the stakes, they are so childishly high that only the youngest of viewers will take them in any way seriously.
That leaves the special effects, which register as juvenile and insufficient, to hold us. Unfortunately, they don't even come close.
Ultimately, this reboot fails to make its idiosyncratic case and thus remains, well, unnecessary.
So we'll alter the DNA of 2 stars out of 4 for the adolescent superpower fantasy four-wheeler, Fantastic Four, during which two's company, three's a crowd, and four's a disappointment.
