Fantastic Four Review by Tom West
August 11, 2015 9:13 pm | Leave your thoughts
Ratings System:
Toss It = Hate It
Taste It = Liked It
Tupperware = Loved It
FANTASTIC FOUR REVIEW
Director: Josh Trank
Writers: Josh Trank, Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater
This year’s Fantastic Four has been panned by many critics, bloggers, tweeters and pundits of all stripes, but I don’t think it is outright awful, in fact, I prefer it to the Tim Story films.
Firstly, we get better performances for Sue, Reed and Doom. The cast is led by Miles Teller, who ably portrays a young Reed. Given a better script, these actors could’ve matched the chemistry seen in The Avengers, but I wanted to see more from Jamie Bell. He had just been turned into a rock monster so perhaps that’s why he was a bit quiet. He can play a tough street kid, just not Ben Grimm, and why did he stop growing?
Michael B. Jordan has the hardest job in matching Chris Evans, but I think he makes the character his own in this grittier version, and this film is definitely more serious in tone, but not too dark, and the reveal of the powers is more traumatic than the previous films.
The biggest problem for me was the dialogue. It’s bad; too many cliches and clumsy attempts at comedic lines, and although the cast did okay with the material they were given, the delivery of some of their lines is awkward.
The last third of the film is very generic, down to the face-off with Doom, who is too similar to the McMahon version, but at least Kebbell tries out an accent. His powers are a little non-descript and bear little resemblance to those in the comic, his presence insubstantial, and his focus seems to be on ‘planet zero’, rather than the earth, which he has always tried to conquer in the comics.
This film also continues the tradition of wimping out, not just on Doom’s origin, but also his majestic turn of phrase, and high-functioning trolling of Richards. That no one in Hollywood has really nailed the greatest intellectual rivalry in Marvel comics puts Fox in a bad light. I’m sure there are screenwriters up to the challenge, especially as this reboot has come so soon, and should demand better characterisation than the Tim Story films. You only have to look at how Whedon manages the exchanges between Stark and Banner, and Singer and Vaughn with the two iterations of the Xavier/Magneto rivalry. By comparison, F4 fans have had to suffice with scraps; the horrendous recourse to the superficial and lazy sort of dialogue we see in this film – ‘I was always smarter than you/ no, I’m smarter’. Bad, bad writing.
I’m surprised Doom never said ‘we’re the same, just different sides of the coin’, such was the mediocrity of the screenplay. There are historic examples of rivalries between great thinkers; Newton and Leibniz, Edison and Tesla, Feynman and Gell-Mann. Why not research them for inspiration? Stan Lee and other writers for the FF always saw the relationship between Reed and Doom as more Holmes and Moriarty than Obi Wan and Vader. Their minds are their greatest weapons. Reed is called in when the more ordinary geniuses -such as Stark and Pym – are struggling with a plan or device, while Doom’s greatest strength is not his armour, but his iron will, and his greatest weakness – his boundless Ego – is also part of the mind . With this film’s more sober approach, I had hoped for some glimmer of acerbic wit, some erudite oneupmanship that showed off their cerebral prowess, but with the rewrites came the glib and unsubstantial ‘telling’ of their intelligence, rather than the tightly written showing we get other films. One of my favourite interplays between characters in a superhero film was with Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina in Spider-Man 2, and I’ve never been a great fan of Doc Ock. I’m sure fellow fans of Stretcho and ol’Rivet-face will understand the need for good writing for these characters, and with the latter, the dialogue need not be too subtle.
Overall, the film doesn’t deserve to the turkey it is starting to become – mainly for the sake of a talented cast – and the realistic first half and character elements make up for the trite and boring third act, but in this respect it seems no worse than many superhero films, with many suffering from CG-overload in their climactic battles, devoid of any real tension. As for the first hour, the director keeps everything quite grounded for a while, and to my pleasant surprise, the experiment scene at the Baxter ‘foundation’ reminded me of Joe Dante’s Innerspace, which has a perfectly balanced tone between scientific endeavour, comedy, adventure and menace, and a film I have long seen as a stylistic template to a successful Fantastic Four Movie. It also has one of my favourite scores of any motion picture, from the now-deceased legend Jerry Goldsmith.
Go and watch it, and think of what could’ve been done with Marvel’s first family if Fox gave a damn. It can be done, but before you lavish a film with hundred million dollar effects and a promising cast, it helps to spend some time and money on a good script and a director who can deal with studios.
Now that I think of it, give the next sequel/reboot to Joe Dante!
Anyway, enough daydreaming. I give this version a low taste it
Tags: fantastic four, Jamie Bell, Marvel, Miles Teller, pop culture leftovers, Tom West
Categorised in: Movie Reviews
This post was written by Leftover Brian
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