Fantastic Four
Year: 2015
Rating: PG-13
Length: 100 minutes / 1.67 hours
For a movie with “fantastic” in its title, it’s anything but. It’s difficult to make a movie that’s worse than the original that was released a decade earlier, but here we are. I understand the need to reboot a franchise so the owners of the rights can continue to hold onto those rights, but this is just a sad excuse for a movie. I only hope—now that Disney owns this franchise—that the next reboot of the Fantastic Four doesn’t spend any time on its origin story (which we’ve seen twice now).
While the casting for the main characters was technically proficient, if not a little young, I was stunned to see such wooden and emotionless acting from absolutely every actor on the screen. If I didn’t know any better, they replaced these actors with CGI robots who state their lines instead of, you know, acting. Additionally, there didn’t seem to be any stakes in this film for the main characters to have any reason to do what they did. Things just happened, and they were merely in the right place at the wrong time.
It was also surprising how obvious the CGI was. Certain scenes stuck out as clearly CGI, even if they didn’t have to be. Let’s not even get into the “look” of Doctor Doom (Toby Kebbell). Sure, it had its moments, like the look of Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), but overall it pulled me out of the story. Of course, I glanced at the clock and found that two-thirds of the film had passed before anything even remotely resembling a conflict emerged. Knowing full well who the villain would be, I had no idea what his motivation was right up until he stated it (basically straight to the camera). Overall, save yourself 100 minutes and don’t ever watch this film.
A reprehensibly bad reboot, I give Fantastic Four 1.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
