Fantastic Four (2015) – Movie Review
Fantastic Four (2015) – PG-13
Release Date: Fri 07 Aug 2015
Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is approached by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) as Richards’ science fair project has unexpectedly solved a major hurdle in Storm’s project to perfect inter-dimensional travel. Richards finishes the machine, but after hearing that government stooge Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson) is going to allow NASA to make the first human trips, Richards and three others go instead. When disaster occurs, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) is left for dead and the three survivors plus a technician caught in the dimension-travelling energy wave are forever changed with superpowers.
Fantastic Four has been adapted into movies several times, and I have to say that this may be the worst. Sure it has a bigger budget and some great actors in its cast, but it wastes them all on a deary setting and zero character development. Can one spoil a movie this astoundingly predictable? The 2005 iteration had some humor. It was silly and not nearly as good as its contemporaries, but it wasn’t painfully slow and boring. The 2015 movie is only 100 minutes long and feels like they purposefully did as little as possible to save some plot for the sequel.
The unreleased 1994 Fantastic Four movie is a hilariously bad, micro-budget movie. The 2015 movie has CGI in almost every shot and a lot of it is extremely bad. A particularly painful moment comes when the research team does a live travel test with a chimp. The chimp looks comically CGI. It’s a total embarrassment let alone next to contemporary effects.
Fantastic Four isn’t just a bad modern superhero movie. It’s bad by every standard. The plot is excruciatingly dull, the tone is always serious and not one action scene is fun or thrilling. I would call it the new Batman and Robin, but that movie is camp and fun to watch and make fun of with friends. Fantastic Four (2015) is tantamount to long lines at the DMV.
Cal, Aaron and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion in the car:
