Los 4 fantásticos

Fantastic Four started catching my eye in the casting stage. Seemingly not giving a damn about the source material, it was refreshing to see those kind of balls especially from Marvel. While I welcome Michael B. Jordan as The Human Torch, I wish I could say the same thing about the rest of the film. Fantastic Four is merely a reboot that loses its steam after the first act. Coming in at just over an hour and a half, the film is a rushed piece of reject summer movie drab. The characters are paper thin and about 10 years too young for their respective roles. The visual effects are far from stunning, especially The Thing, whose transformation into the ghastly beast is something closer to a PS2 game than an actual film with a $100 million price tag. Miles Teller proves here that his performance in Whiplash is truly a fluke. As Mr. Fantastic, he struggles to sound like he knows what he is talking about. Perhaps a little more rehearsal time and a little less focus on that cheap looking silver streak in his hair could have benefited him. Kate Mara as Susan Storm is about as idiotic as it can get. Mara is a great actress, there's no other way about it but Kate Mara as Susan Storm is terrible and borderline embarrassing. The biggest shock here in this film is where all the controversy started...Michael B. Jordan as The Human Torch. Jordan's ability to be a badass likable gear head is insanely good. He's the best part of this film by far. If there is anyone that could single handedly carry this film on their back, it is him. The film overall is too dark for Fantastic Four and too shallow for Marvel which leaves it drifting somewhere between ridiculous and not necessary...and at times, both. If there's any movie to see this summer, I can assure you, Fantastic Four is NOT it.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should – and this wholly unnecessary and woefully terrible reboot of Marvel's most famous superteam is proof of that axiom. Say what you may about Tim Story's earlier cinematic adaptations, but as generic and middling as they were, they were at the very least entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot even be said of Josh Trank's back-to- basics origin story, which plays like a humourless retread of his debut film 'Chronicle' but on a bigger budget – and lest there be any doubt, it is far, far from fantastic.

Not that it doesn't demonstrate such promise; the first act which establishes the friendship between the visionary Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his tough-guy longtime best pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) as well as the team dynamics between Reed and the other members of his research team – the equally brilliant Sue (Kate Mara), her hot- headed younger brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and malcontent genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kibbell) – capably lay the foundation for what could have been a character-driven drama based on their clashing personalities. Indeed, after the boys sans Sue decide on a whim following a night of intoxication to put their teleporting machine to the test, how they respond to their newfound super-powers individually and as a team should be an organic evolution from how they were before.

Alas, Trank, who co-wrote the screenplay with 'X-Men' veteran Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, doesn't quite know where to go from there. Rather than setting them on a course that would follow the perennial 'X-Men' theme of inclusiveness versus insularity against the rest of society, our teenage super-heroes are pretty much seen only in an isolated military facility where they are trained and from which they are deployed on covert operations overseas. While Johnny relishes the opportunity to be different, powerful and useful for once in his life, Sue and Ben are not quite so sanguine and participate insofar as there remains a possibility that the Government's research on them would yield some way of reversing their abnormalities. In the meantime, Reed has vanished off the grid, while Victor is presumed dead on the planet they had landed up on in the other dimension.

One senses a conscious decision on the part of Trank to eschew the usual superheroics seen in the recent profusion of Marvel and to a lesser extent DC comic book adaptations, but the middle act drags precisely because Trank never quite finds a compelling substitute. Johnny's potential conflict with Sue and Ben over the Government's exploitation of their super-powers never amounts to anything more than a playground squabble. The estrangement between Johnny and his father (Reg E. Cathey), whose Baxter Institute had overseen the ill- fated project, is under-cooked. And last but not least, Reed's guilt over his teammates' fates as well as his strained friendship with Ben seem to vanish as quickly as he is apprehended and brought back to the facility to aid them in version 2.0 of the same project.

Trank's intention of emphasising the tension within the quartet is evident and admirable, but is ultimately undone by a script that doesn't develop it in any substantive manner. Worse still, it leaves an audience looking for visual spectacle severely wanting, that not even a very busy third act manages to salvage. Doom makes an unsurprising return here as their common enemy, driven by a fusion of body and alien matter to cause global destruction and around whose defeat to ensure the survival of planet Earth becomes a rallying call for the team to unite despite their differences. It is one of the dullest and most unexciting finales we've seen in a Marvel movie, not least for the fact that it doesn't know how to collectively bring together their superpowers except in a tag-team fashion to distract their opponent.

It is also on the whole one of the ugliest comic book movies we've ever seen. The planet from which the quartet gain their powers is a barren rocky wasteland that has no character or distinction whatsoever, shrouded perpetually with thick grey clouds and given the even more nondescript name of 'Zero'. The energy that gives them their abilities appears as some slimy green goo that belongs entirely in a C-grade Syfy TV movie, while their powers – whether Reed's rubber limbs or Sue's telekinesis or Johnny's pyrotechnics or Ben's rock-covered body – look equally cheesy. It is no wonder too that the eventual showdown, which takes place almost entirely on the planet surface of 'Zero', doesn't play out any much better against such a bland setting, coming off even worse than any of the action scenes in its predecessors.

And certainly, this reboot is in no way better than Tim Story's earlier adaptations, no matter of its ambition of being a darker and more character-driven superhero piece. 'Chronicle' may have been a perfect calling card for Trank, but 'Fantastic Four' shows a young, inexperienced director completely out of his depth, absolutely justifying the advance bad buzz it had spent months battling. It is utterly embarrassing that a film about Marvel's most enduring creations is no better than a live-action 'Power Rangers' movie, but that's exactly the ignominy that this misconceived and badly executed excuse of a superhero movie has wrought.

As is typical with such origin stories, this one ends with the quartet 'stumbling' on their title as they admire their new home in Central City and reflecting on how far they have come. Ben aka the Thing describes their journey as "fantastic"; we're not entirely sure anyone of their audience shares the same sentiment.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this movie at all. I was a huge skeptic when the first trailer came out thinking it would be another FF movie chock full of cheesy one-liners and cartoony humor. In that respect, I was way off. Josh Trank's Fantastic Four is grounded in relative realism, showing what would likely happen if people did in fact crack inter-dimensional travel and brought back superpowers. It has a darker tone than the other movies and is a wildly different experience because of it. The characters are more relatable, their situations are more believable, and for a good part of the movie, it actually feels like you're watching the true Fantastic Four origin story unfold.

I can't blame Trank for the discrepancies I have with the movie because he is not at fault. Apparently the producers demanded reshoots which rear their ugly head about 20 minutes from the end. It turns from this relatively dark, stylish superhero drama to an overblown one-liner infested CGI-fest. Mind you, I was still pulling for the heroes the entire time, but the moments following, preceding and including the final confrontation are so forcefully rushed and haphazardly put together it completely disconnects you from what the first hour of the movie set-up. The climax is generic and lackluster, and the believable shaky chemistry the characters shared in the beginning of the movie becomes incredibly forced and awkward. The shift is so drastic it's as if they Frankenstein'd two separate movies together, making for one extremely disjointed watching experience.

Miles Teller and the rest of the cast have the benefit of being immensely likable. They worked well together and had palpable chemistry for a good chunk of the movie. Even Doom was fine. Once I got past the fact that it wasn't the comic book's adaptation of "Doctor Doom" and took him at face value as a sci-fi villain, I thought he worked wonders and actually posed a genuine threat to humanity. The CGI as a whole is great - a few moments will leave you scratching your head as in "was that really necessary?" but for the most part, the alternate dimension looks fantastic and the few fight scenes there are (literally only two or three) are executed well.

Again, these are simply hints of what the movie could've been. It's obvious Trank had a vision with this world, and it's a damn shame that we won't be able to see it in full effect. What we're left with is a promising set-up and a complete mess of a third act with potential bleeding out right up until the final frames. Fantastic Four is more realistic and immersive than the other two adaptations, but unfortunately not as fun as either. What we're left with is an exercise in "what could have been" and another superhero movie with promising aspects that simply did not click.

... about the first family of Marvel Comics. A lot of the story lines and characters have been switched around "for a modern sensibility". Teenage genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his high school buddy Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) build a working inter-dimensional matter transporter, which naturally brings them to the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his super-science team, who are attempting to do the same thing but on a larger scale.

Reed is brought into the research team, joining Storm's adoptive genius daughter Sue (Kate Mara) and hot-headed son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), as well as brooding genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Reed, Ben, Johnny and Victor use the transporter to travel to the other dimension, where things go wrong, Victor is lost, and the others are brought back changed (Sue is also altered upon the return of the others). From here the story gets bad really quickly, as the government takes them captive, and some go on the run, and others fight with the army.

Suffice it to say, that as bad as the previous film adaptation went, this is much worse, and fails to get a single aspect of the story or the characters right, or even makes an interesting or compelling film for those who don't know the comic book backstory. This flopped hard at the box office, and plans for a series were thankfully scrapped. Also featuring Tim Blake Nelson. Directed by Josh Trank, although many stories of behind-the-scenes chaos and extensive re-shoots draw into question how much was done by whom. From 20th Century Fox.

I was waiting for something to happen and then the movie was over.