Fantastic Four Non-Spoiler Movie Review

Fantastic Four is a movie that actually starts out with a decent origin type story but the ending is anything but Fantastic.

The basic premise for the movie is that 5 young kids, Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) are brought together under the tutelage of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), biological father to Johnny and adopted father to Sue Storm. The group is tasked with inventing an inter-dimensional transporter to take them to a place that has been dubbed Planet Zero (I assume for you familiar with the comics this is supposed to be the Negative Zone) for the Baxter Foundation and it’s corporate execs lead by Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), who you might recognize as The Leader from the last Hulk movie. After succeeding in their goal, Von Doom, Richards, Johnny & Grimm decide to take the transporter for an unauthorized jaunt and as you can imagine things don’t go quit as planned. Doom is lost for dead and the others along with Susan who helps the three return home get zapped with mystical energies which results in them being endowed with amazing powers.

I don’t know what exactly happened and why a movie that started off well ended so badly. Perhaps the studio had to rush the script in order to meet a deadline that would prevent the character rights reverting back to Marvel and Disney or perhaps the writers just didn’t know how to script a movie with a good beginning, middle and ending. Honestly the biggest problem here which was a problem I had with the previous Fantastic Four movies, is these guys just don’t seem to get a handle on the films bad guy Dr. Doom. In the comics Doom is one of Marvel’s greatest villains who is a methodical genius that relies primarily on science and technology similar to Iron Man’s Tony Stark to accomplish his schemes but in these movies they always want to seem to give him cheesy super powers, in this case far reaching powers that include just being able to stare at someone causing their heads to explode (I think someone watched the movie Scanners one to many times when coming up with this one). Not only did Doom come off incredibly cheesy, the dialogue in the film deteriorated as it went a long. You ended up with lines like when Sue says to Reed, ”We can’t beat him, he is more powerful than each of us” with Reed replying, “Your right, but he’s not more powerful than all of us”.

I believe the studio 20th Century Fox also missed out on an opportunity to create their own Marvel Universe with the likes of the X-Men (As the studios has teased over the course of the past year they would be doing). Not one time was there ever any mention of mutants or the powers they bring. We don’t even get a Stan Lee cameo in this one.

I didn’t have high expectations going into this movie, but what is the most disappointing about this movie is it actually had potential to be good, but the writers and the Director Josh Trank really dropped the ball with the ending of this one. If you do decide to go to the theaters for this one and not just wait for it to be released on video, don’t worry about sitting through the credits because their is no after-credit scene with this one.

Grade C-