'Fantastic Four'

In cinemas August 6th!

Why was Tim Blake Nelson constantly chewing? Sorry, I had to get that off my chest up front, but he was chewing throughout the film, it was very distracting. But we can move on to the film properly now we are past all the damn chewing! Sorry.

Anyway, 'Fantastic Four' is a reboot that deviates from the source material significantly enough for me to have gone into it quite skeptically, as many did I’m sure. In fact it’s not unfair to remark that the story deviates so far from the original that you can’t help but wonder whether or not they only called it 'Fantastic Four' to avoid copyright infringement.

Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a brilliant young genius who invents a teleportation device out of scraps in his garage before he’s even hit puberty. With the help of unlikely friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) he develops the device into an unappreciated school science fair project that is sniffed at by his teachers, but which catches the attention of nearby nerds Dr Franklin Storm (Reg E Cathey) and adopted daughter Sue Storm (Kate Mara). They inform Reed he has inadvertently created a portal to another dimension and they recruit him to their sister project to help fill in the gaps and create true dimensional travel.

Accompanied by Dr Storm's son Johnny (Michael B Jordan) and rival genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), the originator of Dr Storm’s dimensional travel project, they perfect the design and prepare to travel to the other dimension. And if you know much of anything about the Fantastic Four you can surmise the rest of the film. Things don’t go as planned, super powers are gained, the world comes into peril and our heroes must save the day.

If the superhero stuff seems like more of an afterthought in that description it’s because it pretty much is in the film as well, but that’s not strictly speaking a complaint, the film is about seventy percent extended origin story and it actually all works really well. The characters are well established, although Ben Grimm is criminally underused, I’m tempted to say the younger version in the opening flashback has more screen time than Jamie Bell does. Weird as it may seem, the film actually suffers once the superhero element kicks in.

This is the problem, the new set up is actually inventive and interesting but once we have to tackle the source material it seems like the filmmakers lost interest. Even the more horrifying elements of the characters powers manifesting, Johnny Storm seemingly writhing in pain as his body burns for example, make for an intriguing take on the characters but the film doesn’t want to do anything with it. The four are confined to a military facility and treated as a science experiment for the clear exploitation of the continually chewing Tim Blake Nelson who looks to exploit their abilities as a military resource, which as I say is an interesting angle but it goes nowhere.

The conspiracy amounts to much of nothing and the four, despite being conflicted about their allegiances and fearful of their abilities come to terms with these issues in a screen that reads “1 Year Later” (yes, really, we skip this entire plot development). Dr Doom shows up in the third act just long enough to make enemies and crowbar in a climactic battle and that’s it, that’s all we got.

So yeah, we’re left a little disappointed. A lot of the film works but once we enter the superhero side of things it feels weirdly out of place, like you’re not sure why they included it at all. The set up is great and there’s a lot of interesting places you could go with it but for some unclear reason they tried to shoehorn in a bunch of unrelated comic book lore. The films sets up for a sequel, maybe even a franchise of it’s own, so I’d like to think that the point here was more than just a studio dragging out the ownership of this intellectual property, but I suspect this is not a strong enough beginning to spawn anything new and interesting.

The individual pieces work but the whole doesn’t fit together. I didn’t hate it as much as some seem to have and I’d watch a sequel if one did emerge, but I don’t think I can recommend this film with any enthusiasm. See it at your own risk I suppose is what I’m saying.

Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.

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