Describing the precise ways in which Fantastic Four shits the bed is not easy. It puts into stark relief just how comprehensively Marvel have figured out a workable formula, a process which can stamp anything from Ant-Man to Thor into uniformly acceptable product. Fantastic Four is such a mess that it makes one long for that sweet, sweet Marvel anonymity: at least in the MCU™, consistent mediocrity is assured.
Director Josh Trank talked a huge game as Four was in production: he namedropped Spielberg, Tim Burton, even David Cronenberg as reference points. And I suppose if you were to put an Amblin movie, The Fly, and Edward Scissorhands into a teleporter, you’d get something exactly as misbegotten as Fantastic Four, a throwback to the days when superhero movies weren’t part of a meticulously planned media blitz but lone, flailing attempts at Getting It Right.
The opening stretch is a slice of drained, blue-gray '80s homage (though it takes place in 2007) that tastes like Spielberg-via-Abrams, every scene shot from about three more angles than necessary, all thirdhand nostalgia that clumsily sets up the relationship between Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) and Reid Richards (Miles Teller). The film promptly abandons this relationship to build several more, such as they are, before knocking them all down with a fatally misjudged “One Year Later” title card: a card which signals the film’s tipping point from sloppy-but-watchable to flat-out disaster.
Even at a comparatively merciful 100 minutes (70 — seventy! — of which are setup, and take place almost entirely inside a white-walled lab set), the film manages to feel at once far too rushed and entirely too fucking long. It’s not difficult to see that Trank’s ambitions were twisted by studio intervention; the final product has been re-shot and hacked to bits, leaving brief moments of idiosyncrasy adrift between regrettable CG and a score that seems determined to smear everything in the same vaguely-uplifting gloss (the credits assert that Philip Glass was involved; I am convinced this is a joke).
And honestly, the glimpses of what this movie could have been aren’t particularly promising either. A harrowing, transgressive horror film about a guy who becomes really stretchy and another guy who is always on fire sounds fucking awful. Filmmakers like to forget that Cronenberg was more than special effects: all of his work scrapes at a perverse thematic heart. That’s not the Fantastic Four. This material needs a light touch, or, preferably, not to be adapted into film at all.
But, no: The Four are given their powers in a preposterous sequence that goes to hilariously literal lengths to show, say, just how Ben Grimm gets turned into the Thing. The aftermath is a protracted, bizarre scene of stark horror that hews closest to what Trank says he wanted the film to be like. Well, that and an incongruous, grotesque Akira riff — the film has the balls to actually quote a shot from the anime — toward the end, which finds Doctor Doom splattering brains in a telekinetic rampage. Trank’s first film, Chronicle, was a lowkey Akira remake. Maybe we should just toss him that bone and let him do his thing at this point.
You won’t be surprised to hear that jamming all this together doesn’t work. None of it works. Perhaps a grad student 10 years from now will write a dissertation on how Fantastic Four subtly evokes the physical trauma of its mutated protagonists by being formally disjointed and distended. Perhaps they will get an A, and the existence of this movie will finally mean something.
There are maybe two shots in this lifelessly lensed thing that achieve something evocative, beyond hollow pastiche and second-unit horseshit, and they’re both of eyes. You don’t need $120 million to shoot the human face. The cast is uniformly lost. Tim Blake Nelson gives a sterling example of gum acting, while a pallid, grotty Miles Teller grows the least virile beard in cinematic history. Kate Mara may as well not exist, to the extent that she doesn’t even go on the team’s fateful field mission: this is perhaps taking the “Invisible Woman” thing a little too far. And reliable bit player Reg E. Cathey (The Wire, Freddy on House of Cards) is reduced to reciting motivational platitudes during all his scenes.
Michael B. Jordan is in this movie, and that’s all I can really say about him. This isn’t to imply that the cast is at fault, because they’re not: if you give an orchestra half a page of sheet music, they’re going to stop halfway down the page.
To whet your appetite even more: Portishead and Borat are used as cultural touchstones. The name Victor Von Doom is spoken aloud, in all seriousness, by a bunch of suits in a boardroom. And Doom’s design is one for the ages, a sort of Giger-designed crash-test dummy. The 10-minute action climax consists of our heroes yelling descriptions of the action while some of the worst visual effects in Marvel’s catalog limp across the screen.
It’s not that better effects would have saved this thing (in fact, the Thing himself looks fine most of the time; impressively rocklike), but at least it would’ve been a distraction. Every atom of Fantastic Four screams of its own failure. If Trank truly aspired to Cronenberg, it’s damning that he and his corporate masters came up with something more akin to The Fly II: a gruesome, dull, utterly inessential film. If the choice is between utterly anonymous studio product or the flayed, skinless remnants of actual artistic ambition, I suggest you stay home.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.