Film Review - Fantastic Four (2015)

Fantastic Four is directed by Josh Trank and stars Miles Teller as Reed Richards, a young scientific genius who is admitted to the Baxter Institute where he meets Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) as well as bringing along his best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) but when they travel to another dimension something goes wrong and the four of them find themselves holding incredible power.

I was looking forward to this movie despite all of the articles going on about how the production of the film was a mess mainly because of the people involved here: Trank made Chronicle in 2012 which I loved, Simon Kinberg who co-wrote the script and produces the film is coming off X-Men Days of Future Past plus the 4 young actors playing the Fantastic Four are great young actors Teller in particular so could something good come of the troubled production or was it Doomed to fail?

Sadly very sadly the latter has happened here and when I began to think about the film after coming out of my session of it I thought to myself "I'm not angry but I am just very very very very disappointed" in everyone involved as this movie feels like a dead weight being projected onto a cinema screen in front of you.

First off I have to start with Trank did he have any real tangible vision here because the way the film is put together in terms of the editing its messy scenes are cut off very quickly there's no real sense of a structure to the storyline of the films or the world or the characters in any way and the climax is a mess and I wonder if Matthew Vaughn (who is also a producer on this film) was brought in at some point by 20th Century Fox to either get this film back on track or was he offered to direct it himself.

I say this because Vaughn was going to make Days of Future Past but left that film to make Kingsman the Secret Service but I can't help but wonder if he was offered this film to direct and said No in favour of Kingsman but decided to help produce the film so he could possibly help Trank behind the scenes in terms of making such a large scale film but frankly I don't think anyone comes out of this mess clean not the production crew or Fox.

And also the 4 young actors are wasted in their roles, they don't really seem to get a good handle on their characters and their dialogue scenes are just leaden and I mean concrete leaden and Toby Kebbell as Dr Doom is a joke of a villain.

And all this movie has done also is just remind me how good that very first X-Men film Bryan Singer made in 2000, that film set up a world worth watching and getting invested in, it gave you the core X-Men on a mission as a team, it had the dynamic between Xavier and Magneto and you fully understand the vision Bryan had for that film in terms of setting it in the real world (the opening scene is of a young Magneto in a concentration camp) and stripping away a lot of the silliness from the X-Men comics whereas here with this F4 film the whole thing feels empty and heavily tampered with in terms of a vision.

Look I wanted to like this movie I really did but I can't say that and it disappoints me to do so given the crop of talent involved and I now have concerns for X-Men Apocalypse next year despite everything I've seen from that film looking incredible but if you want a fun action time at the cinema go to Mission Impossible instead of Fantastic Four, 1 out of 5.