Fantastic Four

Fantastic For Insomnia

BACKGROUND

The history of the Fantastic Four movies is a long and complicated thing.  But I'll try to be brief...

The Cowlick hairdo was all the rage back then...

Back in 1986, the Constantin Film company bought the movie rights to adapt the comic book supergroup to the big screen.  

However with nothing happening in the eight years after, Roger Corman was hired in 1994 to produce a low-budget film so that the company could retain the rights and not have them revert back to Marvel.  

The Fantastic Four had a trailer and a promotional tour, and even the cast were excited for it's upcoming release, but nothing ever happened... With the film inexplicably shelved, the movie rights were bought by 20th Century Fox.

2005 comes around and the Jessica Alba/Chris Evans-version of Fantastic 4 is released to mediocre reviews but box-office success, resulting in the sequel Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer two years later.  

But since audiences weren't clamouring for a three-quel to this underwhelming super-hero franchise, things then went dark for a few years.

Slowly but surely, the rapidly-expiring movie rights came into contention again.

I can only imagine a shareholder meeting went something like this...

"If another Fantastic Four movie doesn't get made soon, the rights will revert back to Marvel!  You know, those guys who are killing the box-office with their massively impressive and coherent Cinematic Universe!  

We can't let them get their hands on some superheroes who could be included in the next Avengers film!  That'd be terrible for us!  Let's do what we did with those god-awful Amazing Spider-Man films and just throw one together!"

And here we find 2015's Fantastic Four, or FantFourStic as the poster would have you believe...

"PLOT"

When they're freaking ten years old, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) manage to crack teleportation.  Seriously.  But no one believes them... despite the overwhelming evidence they can produce.

Cut to a few years later, and Dr Franklin Storm recruits Reed to work in his laboratory trying to crack inter-dimensional teleportation.  There he meet the reckless technician Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), his adopted scientist sister Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and the loner genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) who has a crush on Sue.

After figuring out how they can cross into another dimension within days of Reed's arrival, they are told they can't travel though (rightfully, since they're nerds, not astronauts).  So Reed and his team get drunk, behave like idiots and go through anyway!

Whilst there, they get touched by mysterious goop, blah blah blah, Victor gets covered in the stuff, blah blah blah, they come back and they have super-powers! What a shocker, you get the idea...

OPINIONS

Oh my God, this film.  Where to begin...?

This film made me legitimately angry.  Seriously.  At one point I got so frustrated with the confusing mess on screen, I shouted out "DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON?!" quite late on into the film.  

Thankfully I was sat with friends in an empty screening so it was answered with equally confused shakes of the head, and not in my removal from the screen.

The entire film feels like a 100 minute long trailer for another film that never happens.  There are hints at potential tension that never occurs, ruined friendships that just get fixed in an instant and romance triangles that spectacularly never get touched upon.

Remember when things were fun and light-hearted? *sigh*

The main problem stems from the fact the director Josh Trank (director of semi-superhero film Chronicle) wanted to take the film in a realistic and gritty direction, similar to The Dark Knight or Man of Steel, and treating the super-abilities like deformities or illnesses. 

Admittedly, that is an interesting approach to the subject of super-powers, especially in the scene where Reed is just getting used to his stretching ability and you can hear bones crack as they grow and shrink in size.

However, the Fantastic Four as a group have always been a light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek style of superhero.  The problem with FantFourStic is by taking out all the fun of the powers and portraying them as freaks or social outcasts, you drape a black cloud over all the action and drama. 

You feel like it's a chore to be in their company, something that is the complete opposite with any film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially Ant-Man, released only a few weeks prior to FantFourStic.

Another issue the film suffers from is that none of the main four characters are interesting, or even likeable. 

Reed is a power-hungry narcissist who abandons his friends at the first sign of trouble.  

Ben is hardly in the damn film, and yet when he turns into The Thing, he just becomes a Hulk-For-Hire, sitting miserably in his room, unhappy with his mere existence.  

Sue is just boring and has no personality, other than Daddy's Girl.  

And I know the character of Johnny Storm is a 'hot-head' with a heart of gold, but damn I never realised how perfect Chris Evans was in the role before I saw someone else try to portray him. Nothing against Michael B. Jordan, but his cocky and arrogant Human Torch has no endearing qualities at all.

All of that is before we even touch on Victor Von Doom.

This is Doom by the way.
You'll see him for all of ten minutes,

Toby Kebbell is SUCH an amazing talent, and yet in FantFourStic, he is given nothing to work with.  

He starts off as a wayward protégé of Dr Storm's, hating the world and playing video games (which was a persona I was willing to go along with).  

When he is brought onto the team, he becomes a standard boring scientist, jealous of Reed and Sue's growing 'relationship'.  

A year after his abandonment on Planet Zero (or wherever they got sent to), he ultimately becomes a crazed and maniacal psychopath fused with a mysterious and unexplained green goo.

Dr. Doom is considered to be one of the greatest supervillains of all time, and he is given around 10-15 minutes of screen time!  And in those short few minutes, he manages to rack up an impressive and unnecessary kill-count for a 12A-rated film.  All killed by squeezing people's heads until they break using his, again unexplained, telekinetic abilities.  Yay!  Happy! Fun! Superheros for kids!

LET'S WRAP IT UP

God, I could carry on for a whole other article about what is wrong with FantFourStic, but you get the picture.  It's just such a mess.  All soulless and empty, with the main goal to just keep the movie rights in the greedy hands of 20th Century Fox.

The film disappoints on nearly every level, but coming from such a promising director and with the initial scenes having some degree of potential, it's just even more of a let-down.

Hopefully Marvel/Disney will see the damage that their child's guardian is doing to it and step in before another reboot is shoved down our throats in ten years time.  They've managed to successfully negotiate a deal for joint custody of Spider-Man, hopefully they can do the same with the Fantastic Four.

I would call this film the worst of the year so far, but I know a film that is worse... and that's getting reviewed next...

Rating - 2/10

Until next time folks, thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed what you read, 

'Like' me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Mike-Dunn-Reviews 

or 'Follow' me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MikeDunnReviews

I Am Number Four

I Am Number Poor

I Am Number Four is an adaptation of the popular young adult novel of the same name. It concerns Number Four (Alex 'Stormbreaker' Pettyfer), the fourth in a line of aliens that have fled their planet, taking refuge on Earth. The bad guys they are fleeing arrive on Earth to finish them off. They kill the first three aliens, imaginatively named Number One, Two and Three, and start on their hunt for Number Four. This leads Four to flee with his guardian (Timothy Olyphant) and settle in Paradise (sigh), Ohio.

There are three positives I took from this film:

1. Timothy Olyphant. Like most things that Timothy stars in, he's the shining light. He might have starred in the god-awful Hitman adaptation, but his role in The Girl Next Door and his villainous turn in Die Hard 4.0 have made him a favourite of mine. However, he is pushed to the sidelines for most of the film, maintaining a 'disapproving father figure' status throughout. A waste of good talent, he deserves better;
2. Number Six. Played by Australian actress Teresa Palmer, she only appears fleetingly throughout the film, making a worthwhile impact in the final act. Her enthusiasm and attitude is a refreshing change to the dull and boring 'acting' given to us by the two leads. Again, not used well.
3. The first three minutes. Similar to last year's Solomon Kane, if the rest of the film was like the first 180 seconds, it would have been a pretty good film. The opening depicts Number Three's death at the hands of the Big Bads and their gigantic monster-alien-killing-machine-pet thing, and is an exhilarating and shocking chase sequence through an unnamed jungle at night! Since nothing in the film matches up to the attention-grabbing introduction, the film feels like it's steadily going downhill throughout.

I won't describe my dislikes in list format as well, as it'd be a long damn list. Let's just start with the basics.

The acting is atrocious, with Pettyfer giving Keanu and Nic Cage a run for their money in the Wooden Actor Awards, and the storyline is incredibly trite, contrived and similar to many other superior sources, for example, the villains being cheap replicas of the vampires from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Speaking of which, I Am Number Four's storyline is essentially the trials of refugee aliens on Earth, evading their enemies whilst coming to terms with the normal human experiences of an average American teenager. Sounds familiar? It should to any fans of the late-90s/early-00s U.S. TV series, Roswell High/Roswell (jumping point for a teenage Katherine Heigl) as it is essentially the same basic plot.

Perhaps I am just too critical and demanding of a film that is aimed at a younger audience. However, there are certain scenes that are a bit too graphic, such as the film's dental torture scenes (yes, dental torture in a 12A rated film) or the film's special effects-laden fight scenes, which suggest it's trying to encorporate the older audiences too. The film tries to balance the two sides of the film equally, with the 'alien at high school' plot taking slight priority over the 'bad guys are coming to kill you' storyline. This leads to an incredibly predictable series of events including the stereotypical American high-school party and town fair, complete with ferris wheel and ghost train. Meanwhile, we cut to fanged baddies laughing maniacally whilst drilling into people's mouths. Ridiculously juxtaposed storylines.

All in all, I believe Roger Ebert got it right by describing I Am Number Four as 'shameless and unnecessary', as it has just become another stale and uninteresting entry into the already-diluted pool of adaptation and remakes polluting the film industry. Although, on a lighter side, before I watched this film, I was struggling for my Worst Film of the Year contender. Now I have a firm bookend that I'm sure will still be there come December.

Rating - 2/10

Skyline

Beam Me Up

I had quite high hopes for The Strause Brother's (I refuse to call them The Brothers Strause) film, Skyline. The marketing for the film was quite subtle and the trailers showed brief glimpses of big beefy aliens rampaging through Los Angeles and quite ostentatious spaceships sucking up Joe Publics all over the freakin' world! Despite friends and colleagues telling me my hopes were about to be crushed, I went and watched the film, and would have much rather watched the same trailer a few dozen times instead.

Skyline centres around a group of friends (including Eric Balfour and Donald "Turk from Scrubs" Faison) trapped in a Los Angeles penthouse whilst an alien invasion occurs outside their window. As the survivors get picked off one by one, the group become agitated and try to figure out a plan to escape. Meanwhile, the aliens survey the surrounding areas and meet the full force of the American Army.

Sounds like a fantastic premise, right? In that brief scenario, you have the opportunity to have heart-in-mouth moments of people desperately hiding from alien scavengers. There is potential for amazing set-pieces of alien spaceships invading the entire globe and learning of stories from all over the world of different people struggling with this tremendous event. At the very least you have the main characters go through a journey where they learn about the futility of holding grudges or wanting materialistic possessions when life is so short and precious to waste, and they develop as people despite the horrible background to the story, right?

Skyline offers none of that. You must be thinking of Monsters, which I hear handles all of those in a much better way. Unfortunately I watched 90-odd minutes of banality. The characters are painfully two-dimensional, you don't care for their safety by the end of the film, and begin cheering for the aliens to take them off and be done with them. The main part of the storyline is just based around these characters and their own personal escape and no other soul in Los Angeles is seen. This is mainly due to their budget, but it leaves you thinking they are the last people in the entire city, and I felt seeing at least a few other cities and how they were coping would have added to the alien's threat. The stupidity of the characters also seems unrealistic, and I believe that when the "Strausi" wrote the script, they were forced to put in the consierge character (played by the wonderful David Zayas) who's main point is to emphasise how "This is real! This is really happening!"

As the Strause Brothers are special effects artists themselves, it's obvious that the effects came first and the storyline second, and the effects are astounding. The first few minutes of the film where the aliens start their invasion and begin sucking people up for their crazy purpose are genuinely eerie and troubling, but it's just the rest of the film that lets it down. But even though they were the highlight of the film, they still seemed tainted as The Strausi seemed to have lifted ideas from several other Sci-Fi films as well. I stopped counting the amount of times I saw flashes of Independence Day, War of the Worlds and even The Matrix, as I lost spare fingers and toes.

Despite its potential and stunning visuals, Skyline leaves you feeling unfulfilled and angry at the obvious sequel it's hinted to. Please Strause Brothers, don't give us another Skyline. If you don't, I'll even call you by the name you prefer?

Rating - 2/10