Fantastic Four (2015)

Fantastic Four (2015)

I've gone into detail some of the problems this movie faced on my blog, and I can't help but note these problems are the reasons this movie will go down as a bad superhero movie and generally a train wreck of epic proportions. Despite the big budget, it feels like no one really tried making a good movie. However, it is not a bad-bad movie like say Steel or Catwoman, but surprisingly not as fun as the 2005 FF.

Did we really need a reboot for the FF franchise from Fox? Nope, but Fox was about to lose their rights to the property. So, they threw this movie together with an “in over his head” director at the helm. You got tons rewrites and re-shoots with the director sitting on the sidelines. Plus, you had a director that denounced him own movie just before it was released.

First act is pretty good, but the third act is a total mess. The movie is a compete and utter mess and you can see the duct-tape where the studio pieced together the various cuts of the film into one cut. Fox and Josh Trank butted heads in pre and post-production, and it shows all over this movie. Then Fox tried to do CPR on this movie without Trank.

I think Trank didn't have the chops to make a FF movie, and I only think Marvel has the knowledge to write a proper FF movie. Unlike the X-Men, the FF team works better in the larger superhero universe. (Sue Storm plays a role in the comic book version of Civil War.)

-Planet Zero: I found the alien planet to be fascinating in the first act of the movie, but it loses all coolness in the really bad third act. This origin has more in common to the Ultimate versions of the FF team.

-When they were kids: If the flashbacks to the two heroes was important to the story, why is there no payoff to them in the third act?

-The Third Act: The movie changes gears and the entire tone of the movie is different right down to the acting and dialogue. You can clearly see the moment when the actors stopped giving a shit. The dialogue, while not great, was okay up until the third act. It switches to the main characters telling us what they're going to do and spelling it out. You can see the actors not really giving a shit about the re-shoots, due to most of the re-shoots being done for the last act. The third act just harms this movie beyond repair because it makes zero sense compared to first two acts.

-Kate Mara's hair: You want to know where some of the massive re-shoot happened? Watch Kate's hair switch from real hair to a bad wig between shots and completely changes in the third act.

-Dr. Doom: What hell is Dr. Doom's motivation from his first appearance until the end? This is by far one of the worst and under-developed characters in the movie. If you're going to have a villain in your movie, why only have him be the main bad guy literally in the last ten minutes? I know that they were going for the Ultimate version of Doom, but at least give him a more compelling back story? What is up with the dropped blogger thing? Why did he return with the science team in the third act?

-Johnny Storm: At least the first two versions of Johnny Storm had personality. Here, Michael B. Jordan is given NOTHING to do. We don't even get to see his hot-hotheadedness and jokey nature. These things made Johnny Storm cool. Let's make Johnny Storm black, but we won't give him nothing else to do.

-Dr. Doom's super powers are to pop people's heads like balloons and manipulate rocks? : Yes, his super power is to move rocks around and throw them at the FF team. Huh? Was this power in the original script? Rocks seem to be a central theme in this movie even if the writers didn't realize it.

-good actors/bad movie: Yep most of the cast is very good, but the uneven script betrays them. However, the acting goes from being good to wooden in the third act. Nobody wanted to do those re-shoots.

-Miles Teller: Not bad as Reed Richards, but he is wasted.

Avoid this movie.  

Grade: F+