The FANTASTIC FOUR Franchise Is Cursed by the Gods
I was not excited for Fantastic Four. From the first trailer I kept thinking, this looks like complete and utter garbage. So going in, how could I possibly be disappointed? My expectations were painfully low. I was set to just sit down and watch this honestly. Yet somehow I was still horribly, hysterically disappointed.
This isn't a movie, it's the still-rotting, maggot-ridden corpse of the previous iteration of this apparently cursed-by-the-gods series. I never considered that there could be anything worse in the world of comic book movies than the previous skid-marked shorts covered in the vomit of 1000 executives that was the original pairing of Fantastic Four movies.
I could not have been more wrong. In a sentence that I want you to remember as you read the rest of this review I'll state my simple opinion: Fantastic Four is the worst movie ever made. End of story. Worst. Movie. Ever.
This movie started out with the promise of a friendship between Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) and Reed Richards (Miles Teller) that starts with them in 5th grade, which is seven years before the main action of the movie starts. Let me clarify that — Reed Richards is a senior in high school when he is recruited to work for the Baxter Group. No history of scientific achievement, or really any achievement of any kind. He's a kid in a science fair. That's the highlight of this bath of lukewarm sulfuric acid that is this script. I'm not even going to go through the list of things wrong with this movie because you'd be reading for, how long is this movie? Oh yeah, 1 hour 40 minutes. That's 100 minutes of mind-numbing pain as your head is repeatedly rammed into the aforementioned sulfuric acid of this story. Twenitieth Century Fox should be tied to the back of a horse and dragged down Main Street because wild west justice is the only thing that could possibly redeem this assault on human decency.
The few attempts at "humor" were so clearly shoved in your face to say, "Laugh at our jokes, laugh at them!" that there's no possible way it could have been enjoyable. There's no bonding between the characters, even the shadow of the friendship between Ben and Reed is burned away amid a downpour of acidic plot points. Any semblance of a relationship or bond of any kind between the two characters is so forced that I'm pissed they didn't even have the courtesy to spit on their fist first.
Everything about this movie is horrible. The story is a muddy fart in the face of real films and any decent comic book movie. The CG work is so half-assed you won't believe that their budget could possibly be accurate. It seems all of the budget went into the two different shots of a dimension not our own that they had nothing left to spend on the effects for the main characters, ya know, the stuff that makes their powers visually available.
Dr. Doom (Toby Kebbell) doesn't even have a mouth. Go back and read that again. Yup, no mouth. Nothing about him even remotely resembles the character he is supposedly representing. At a couple points he has an inexplicable accent, and then suddenly doesn't again? There's even a point where Sue Storm (Kate Mara) does a horrifically bad fake Russian accent. Russia should sue over it. If Latveria were a real country, this absolutely horrific "movie" would be considered an act of war.
The last 20 minutes was clearly penned by Steve from accounting in the middle of a two day cocaine bender. The actors had even given up by then. Their performances were so lazy it was like watching a middle school production of Hamlet, but without all the good parts. The final "confrontation" with Doom feels like a bad acid trip through a Beatles album. I actually had to restrain myself from laughing until the credits rolled, after which I took a couple minutes to just roll in my seat and weep tears of utterly confused laughter.
Everyone involved in this production should be fired, replaced with Steve in accounting, rehired, then fired again by Steve. If you pay to see this movie, you will suffer in the green lava of the other dimensional bullshit of this movie.