What is a movie review except a love letter to the thing I love so much? Movies are so important to me that not only do I sit and enjoy, spend hours of my life, and think about daily but I also take time to reflect and compose my thoughts to share with the world. For every love letter though, there is a hurricane of hate, so sit tight, strap in and let me save you 2 hours of your life. This is my review of Fan4stic: The death of a franchise.
Before the rivers of hate overflow for this movie, let me start this review with what I liked about this interpretation. First I thought the cast was great, all young, strong actors that did the best with what they had. I think this movie also had a direction at the beginning that I really liked. The Sci-Fi direction was a unique take that could have really stood out but in the end just didn’t work. And there you have it, to be fair in every pile of dog shit there is a plastic toy but it’s still covered in shit so you have to dump it with the rest.
Strap in because this is about to get ugly. I love super hero movies, I look forward to everyone like an N64 for Christmas (see YouTube video) but every once and a while a movie doesn’t live up to their own hype. These movies fall off the wave of cash into a rushed pile of garbage. Fantastic 4 is king of crap on top of disappointing super hero flicks. It stands in a league of its own when the road map has been so clearly rolled out before them. So why was this movie so bad? Let me tell you.
The character development is just skipped over, literally this movie has a one-year time jump that not only is confusing, but also cuts out all of the most interesting development as the team learns to use their powers and work together.
All the action was also just cut out of this movie. I know this because some of the cool scenes from the trailer were even cut out! The best action we get is The Thing smashing tanks for the Army but we don’t really see it, we see the Thing watching himself do those things on a crappy projector… like come on that is just lazy! The Fantastic 4 feels like they looked at their favorite parts and most interesting points of the movie, cut them out and put them on a flash drive so only Fox could watch them. After taking out all of the good parts Fox stitched this movie together and gave us all of the transitions and dialog that leads up to ultimately nothing. Even the final fight scene feels like they cut the good part out… FOX WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US????
The only thing about this that actually felt like a Marvel movie was the crappy villain that is easily beaten by our heroes. Taking the worst parts of the MCU and pasting it onto this terd to make sure there was nothing redeemable about it.
Finally (not because I’m running out of hate but I’m running out of room) the movie doesn’t feel like the Fantastic 4 at all. Marvel’s first family is missing all of the heart, and loyalty they are built upon. This is more like they gave the director of Chronicle more money, bigger sets, and creative freedom to make a movie and he missed the boat completely. When you give a baby a chain saw when it only needs a butter knife shit can get messy real quick and you know what, it did. Josh Trank may not be totally to blame as his tweets suggest but sometimes the captain of SS Shit Pile needs to go down with his ship. If it would have been great he would have been the new hot director so now that its bad he has to live with the most hated man in Super Hero Films (Zach Snyder gives a sigh of relief).
Overall this movie was a disappointment more then anything. About 45min in I looked at my watch and thought “wow I don’t hate this” but it never got off the ground from there. This movie was dull at best and a huge let down based on an interesting take presented in the trailer and opening for this movie. I hold this is the same regard as Transformers 4.
My Ranking: Dumpster Fire