Review: Four score for 'Fantastic Four'

By Adam Pilskog

It's only been eight years since we last saw the "Fantastic FourGÇ¥ on screen. The 2005 attempt to spark the franchise and its sequel two years later were ambitious, and cheesy in the way Marvel superhero movies tend to be.

Perhaps they were also a bit ahead of their time ' special effects-wise ' and a bit too niche for mainstream audiences. Well, audience tastes have become a bit less fickle in the past 10 years, and now anything superhero is palatable ("Ant-ManGÇ¥).

The film starts with the unlikely friendship between brilliant Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and the enforcer best friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell). Their bond grows through high school, where they are recruited to work for a think tank because they created a teleportation device that happens to go to a resource-rich planet in another dimension. Whew, almost ran out of breath.

Sue Storm (Kate Mara) works as a pattern-recognition specialist there, and Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) comes in as a welder, in order to pay off his car. I know, right? Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, whose voice puts James Earl Jones' to shame) is running the think tank, so there's absolutely no nepotism there.

They bring in the genius, but volatile Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel) to assist, because there's literally nobody else in the world who can complete this project except for Reed and Victor. They successfully make a machine, things go wrong in the other dimension, they get their superpowers and then they fight the bad guy who really has no valid reason for being evil in the first place.

The end.

This "Fantastic FourGÇ¥ reboot gives us a slightly different origin story, but still wastes more than the first hour showing us how they gain their superpowers. It was d+¬j+á vu all over again, like I was watching another Spider Man or Batman. They spend way too much time on character development for five individuals who make up the core group. You just can't waste that much screen time with an ensemble cast. We get it: Reed is a nerd genius, Johnny is a reckless hot-head and his adopted sister, Sue, is a computer whiz who is just as good as the guys. Ben is the strong, loyal friend, and Victor is the cynical megalomaniac. We don't need more than an hour to figure that out without any action.

The cast looks great on paper. Teller, Mara, Jordan and Bell are all young, fantastic actors in their own right, but they all tend to make some questionable choices in their roles, more often than they should.

This is the type of film that might have seemed like a good idea, and probably earned a decent paycheck, but, ultimately, I think everyone knew it would bomb.

What I'm trying to say is that all four lead actors were given a terrible script to make a lowball superhero remake way too soon. The bar was just set too low, and opening just a few weeks after "Ant-ManGÇ¥ seems like a head-scratcher to me, unless Marvel was trying to catch the tail-end of the box-office frenzy.

Director Josh Trank ("ChronicleGÇ¥) does his best with the source material, but even the effects aren't particularly impressive, which is unacceptable for a film of this pedigree in 2015. Marvel should have shelved this one for a few years, at least.

It might make a little money, but it's not worth the hit to the reputation, in my opinion. Marvel has the right idea by moving into the Netflix streaming series genre. The company has some shows coming out in the next year or two that just might be worth watching ' stay tuned.

Writer Simon Kinberg takes the brunt of my frustrations with this film, although he had some help ruining it. Just because it's a superhero movie doesn't mean you get to cut corners. Obvious gaps in believability are irresponsible, even with some bending of the rules implicit in the genre, and there needs to be a bit more in terms of exposing character flaws, peril and climax.

This is one Marvel film that you can absolutely skip. I give "Fantastic 4GÇ¥ a generous 4 out of 10.