Fantastic Four

If there is one thing I can’t stand in life, it’s to be stuck around boring people or to be placed in boring situations. In case you haven’t been able to tell from the 800 reviews I’ve done on this page, my life revolves around me entertaining myself almost on an hourly basis. I grew up in a horrible small town in south Texas where the only thing you could do for entertainment was get drunk, listen to country music in a field with your friends, and masturbate; not necessarily in that order, we didn’t have circle jerk parties or anything like that.

But the point is, there was nothing to do, so the second I moved to a town where they had more than three radio stations I promised myself that I would never again sit at home watching USA’s Up All Night for entertainment. Well more often than not I’m actually successful at this, but sometimes I run into instances where staying at home might have actually been a better play; and I’m sad to say that watching the latest adaptation of Marvel’s Fantastic Four fits in that category.

This movie does have some of Hollywood’s youngest and brightest talent in Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, and Toby Kebbell but for some reason they also stick us with the director of Chronicle (Josh Trank) and the not as hot or talented Mara sister in Kate (although this only applies to the land of Hollywood, in real life she’s actually quite attractive), and sadly the movie suffers as a result of it.

I have always considered the Fantastic Four to be the silliest of the Marvel movies mainly due to the fact that outside of Johnny Storm, the other three heroes all have pretty weak powers. Reed Richards (Teller) is a plastic man who can stretch his limbs to abnormal lengths but sadly there don’t take the easy layup and use any sexual innuendos to reference his new ability. Sue Storm (Mara) can create force fields and make herself, as well as other objects around her, invisible but for whatever dumb reason they also make her white when her brother is black. And then the Thing is just this dumb giant rock figure who is always grumpy and runs around tearing things up with his hands; which on the surface (no pun intended) sounds cool but in the context of this movie, it just isn’t. I’m joking on most of these but the point I’m trying to make is that the director failed miserably in his attempt to put these powers to good use.

The key to making any good comic book movie is to make it fun, funny, and thrilling; and tragically this movie meets none of those requirements. Instead Trank gives us boring, drab, and somber. This movie takes itself way too seriously. Even Johnny Storm, who is supposed to be the liveliest of the four is nothing more than a lame version of Roman from the Fast and Furius franchise. He’s supposed to be a hothead street racer who finally finds a purpose in his life but Trank somehow finds a way to even screw up his racing scenes.

All he had to do was steal one of the worst street racing scenes from Fast and the Furious and simply add some nitrous and Ludacris singing "Move bitch get out the way" and you have yourself a money scene. But no, he gave Johnny a lame Mazda that no one in real life actually wants, and he played an old 60’s RnB song that even I didn’t recognize.

And there you have it, that scene alone is a microcosm of this movie; Trank has chance after chance to take what is actually a fairly decent story and make something cool with it but instead he disappoints at every turn. There are actually about two minutes of freshness that happen towards the end once Dr. Doom shows up but that hardly makes up for the fact that you want to kill yourself for actually paying money for this torturous experience.

My advice to you is to avoid this movie at all costs. I give it a rating of completely WACK!