Chris At The Pictures

Note: these are based on UK release dates

10. Sinister 2 – The beigest movie ever.

Worst bit: That by technicality, I have to call it a ‘horror’ movie

Full review here

9. Jupiter Ascending – That was your last chance, Wachowskis, and you royally blew it.

Worst bit: “Bees can sense royalty”

Full review here

8. Seventh Son – Oh, great, another teen franchise based on a boo-zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ

Worst bit: Jeff Bridges trying to speak English

Full review here

7. Taken 3 – Remember when Liam Neeson punching foreigners was fun? The film-makers didn’t.

Worst bit: Forest Whitaker’s evil rubber-band

Full review here

6. Knock Knock ­– Keanu Reeves is Nicolas Cage.

Worst bit: Eli Roth is still making films

Full review here

5. Fantastic Four – I’ve never seen a movie more determined to kill itself.

Worst bit: The spark of a good idea being snuffed out

Full review here

4. Mortdecai – Enough to make you run home and shave your whole body.

Worst bit: It’s a hard choice between Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp and Johnny bloody Depp

Full review here

3. Solace – Forgot this existed? I think the actors have, too.

Worst bit: Not sure, it probably happened while I was asleep

Full review here

2. Pixels – A corporate product wearing the freshly harvested skin of an innocent short film.

Worst bit: Too many to choose from, so just draw up a chart of every scene and throw a dart.

Full review here

1. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension 3D – I know what you’re thinking: “Really, it’s not worth getting that annoyed about, is it?”…you didn’t have to watch it.

Worst bit: Active extortion of the audience.

Full review here

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Quite possibly the worst thing a film can do to you is betray you. Now I know that sounds like hyperbole, but despite the large and varied prejudices aimed at Fantastic Four – Marvel’s latest re-working of their classic comic book series – I entered the cinema truly wanting to be the dissident, the lone voice who found something of a gem within a troubled eventuality. Alas, my hopes were slowly but surely turned to ash as a laborious and suffocated production dragged itself across the screen.

The story will be somewhat familiar to anyone who knows the original comic, but for those who don’t: aspiring scientist Reed Richards (Miles Teller) creates a device capable of inter-dimensional travel and is hired by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey in permanent motivational speech mode) to help develop the machine for NASA. Richards and his companions Johnny Storm, Victor Von Doom and childhood friend Ben Grimm (Michael B. Jordan, Toby Kebbell and Jamie Bell respectively) take a journey to another dimension but are ravaged by cosmic radiation, as is Franklin’s daughter Sue (Kate Mara) when the capsule returns to Earth. Whilst Victor is left behind, the remaining four friends wrestle with strange and powerful new abilities.

The tiny spark of a good idea that I wanted to be much larger manifests itself here in two forms: for one, the opening thirty minutes is mostly character building; developing the dynamic between the young scientists and exuding an Interstellar-like ‘shoot for the moon’ attitude, a hope that extraordinary discovery is just beyond the horizon. Weirdly, the second is a complete clash with this wide-eyed optimism, and appears when the group return from the alien world. Their new powers – far from wowing them or enthusing them to reach for new heights – hurt and traumatise our young heroes, presenting their mutations as a Croenenbergian body horror nightmare.

Sadly, the compromised nature of the film (supposed falling out between the director and the studio, extensive re-shoots, re-workings of the script to name but a few) means that any initial promise is cruelly snuffed out. This is surely a case of the ‘making of’ being a more interesting, exciting and funny final product than the joyless feature it produced.

While at least Teller and Jordan appear to be enjoying themselves, everyone else on screen slips into a stupor by the 40-minute mark, so the promised depth of character and narrative plods to a standstill. One can only imagine how/if the original second half might have saved the project, but for now we’re dealt a clear point where Trank’s film ends and the studio re-shoots begin. The final act is rushed forcibly into empty and unfulfilling action sequences with lumpen dialogue, a cliché villain and super-powers that are arbitrarily introduced when required for the plot and never properly explained.

So those who come for the story will be bored, those who come for action will feel cheated, and God only knows how lovers of the comic must be feeling. I’m never usually lenient on comic fans when it comes to film adaptations (believing that a movie has to stand up on its own terms), but this is something else. Fantastic Four was a chance to heal a wound in Marvel’s movie history, a delicate operation that unfortunately fumbled the scalpel and lobotomised the patient.