★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
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.
