I was one of the most optimistic for the reboot of ‘Fantastic Four’, made perfect choices before production; Josh Trank directed the film (director of ‘Chronicle’) great choice; the casting of the main heroes was perfect; so what went wrong?

 

‘Fantastic Four’ is a disappointing superhero movie, with a few glimpse of potential, suffered with a mediocre screenplay. The film doesn’t have much of an overall story, instead the film has plot points, so that when one plot starts and finishes, the next plot point begins. Reed Richards creates a teleportation machine, taking one object and teleporting it to another; time jumping (and trust me, there is a lot of them) seven years later to Reed in his senior year at a science fair, he grabs the attention of Franklin Storm, director of the Baxter Foundation, along with his daughter Sue Storm. Amazed that Reed has cracked the code in teleporting to and from another world, he is recruited on a similar project called the Quantum Gate.

 

The film has a handful of positives, first the build-up was good, it started strong, only to fall as the film continues to progress, and there is a few characterizations, but sadly, don’t develop based on the few characterizations given, e.g. Sue is adopted, that’s it, no further development based on that. Also, some characters have little to no development, Ben Grimm and Victor Von Doom are noteworthy inclusions with their characters have little development for me to care about, despite some friendship between Reed and Ben, because Ben is underdeveloped, I couldn’t care about their friendship dynamic. If you watch the first trailer (or on our website, the trailer above) where’s Ben’s Baseball scene? I could have said, he likes Baseball, but it wasn’t included in the final film.

 

However, despite this, the acting was pretty good with the four main heroes from what they got given, but the inconsistency with the narrative lets this film down.

 

There isn’t hardly any action. Yes, you heard me correctly, there is hardly any action scenes in this superhero movie. Most of the action is the last 10 minutes of the movie, but by then, you already know because of the trailers. There was one or two action moments (because they go by so quickly), but it was a 100 minute movie that featured more on endless exposition, than telling an entertaining story.

 

Plus, the visual effects, overall, is very mediocre (and this is a 2015 movie?). There are some really cool uses of visual effects, e.g. the Thing and Sue Storm’s powers looked really good, but there are a lot of terrible effects, e.g. the Human Torch and some parts of Reed’s powers.

 

There’s more, but I think this review has gone on long enough.

 

‘Fantastic Four’ is not so fantastic, or fun for that matter.

 

It could have been so fantastic.

 

Score: 1.5/10