Fantastic Four (2015)......10 Years Later


Oh boy! It's time to revisit one of the worst superhero movies ever made before I share my thoughts on "The Fantastic Four: First Steps." Back in 2015, I had the misfortune of seeing this trainwreck disaster on the big screen. The trailers for this movie were epic. I kept seeing the trailers before many films I watched at the time, like "Avengers: Age of Ultron," "Ant-Man," and "Mad Max: Fury Road." The more I saw the trailer for this movie, the more excited I became! Unfortunately, I was not prepared for the disaster I was about to endure.

Before diving into my review, let’s cover some details about this atrocity. It was directed by Josh Trank, who previously directed the criminally overlooked found footage film "Chronicle." The cast includes Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Toby Kebbell, and Tim Blake Nelson, and it tells the origin story of the titular superhero team. However, instead of gaining their powers from being caught in a cosmic storm in space, they acquire their abilities from an alternate dimension after things go wrong.

Are there any good things I can say about this movie? Unfortunately, no! What makes this one of the worst films in the history of superhero cinema? Let’s start with the worst aspect: this movie is downright boring—excruciatingly boring. The majority of the film consists of characters delivering expositional dialogue in dark rooms. Nearly 100% of the dialogue is exposition, and the team does absolutely nothing with their powers until the last 7 minutes of the movie, which is also the only action sequence included!

If you haven't seen this film and are expecting a fun comic book movie with great character dynamics and exciting action, look elsewhere, because this movie doesn’t provide any of that. It is so low-energy and uneventful that it could serve as a cure for insomnia. Visually, the movie is hideous! Some people criticize the MCU for poor visual effects, and I have too, pointing out movies like "Black Panther," "Thor: Love and Thunder," and "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" (though I do enjoy "Black Panther" despite its effects issues). Yet all of those movies look like "Avatar" in comparison to this one!

The green screen effects in scenes set in the alternate dimension are terrible, the invisibility effects on The Invisible Woman look awful, The Thing appears as a joke with its CGI, and Mister Fantastic gets the worst of it! There is one scene where Mister Fantastic changes his face while driving a car, and it looks so bad that you'll either cringe at the incompetence on display or burst out laughing.

The acting is also very bad, especially considering the talent of the cast. They seemed to realize the material they had to work with was dull, because everyone in this movie phones it in. It's especially very shocking to see Michael B. Jordan being as bad as he was in this, considering he gave phenomenal performances in films before and after this one. 

Finally, we must talk about the structure of the movie, or lack thereof. The movie starts off like a normal movie, you get introduced to the characters, you get the setup before they get their powers, you know, a first act! This movie skips over the second act and goes straight into the third act right as soon as they get their powers! You don't get to see them getting used to their powers, you don't get to see them become a family like they are supposed to be. Doctor Doom just becomes Doctor Doom out of nowhere near the end of the movie, they have their climactic battle, boom, that's the movie. I have to quickly talk about Doctor Doom before I wrap this review up. He sucks! He doesn't feel like a threat, he talks like a cross between Zuul from "Ghostbusters" and an emo teenager. The only cool thing he does is make people's heads blow up.

So in the end, 10 years later and this film is still terrible. It has terrible acting, even worse visual effects, no structure and little to no action. This movie is entirely all build-up and no payoff. There are many, many other superhero movies out there people could watch. I said this when it first came out and I'm still saying it today, avoid this film like the plague!

GRADE:  F

Movie Details:
Director:  Josh Trank
Release date:  August 7th, 2015
Studio:  20th Century Fox
Run time:  100 minutes 
MPAA rating:  PG-13 (for sci-fi action violence, and language)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - Movie Review *Spoiler Free*

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is the direct sequel to the excellent Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One and continues the story of Ethan Hunt and his team as they must stop this powerful AI called "The Entity" before the breakout of full scale nuclear war. The film was directed by Christopher McQuarrie and stars Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Hayley Atwell. THE REVIEW If you know me it's no secret that this was my most anticipated film of 2025! I love this franchise, and every single movie since Mission: Impossible III have been consistantly fantastic. Now I will say this isn't the greatest film in the franchise, it's considerably more flawed than the past four entries in this franchise, but I still absolutely loved this film! First off, Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast bring their A game here as expected, all of them give great performances, are charismatic, and do well in the action sequences. Tom Cruise once again puts his life...
Read more

Karate Kid: Legends - Movie Review

Image
Karate Kid: Legends is the latest film in the Karate Kid franchise, the first one in 15 years! After kung fu prodigy Li Fong relocates to New York City, he attracts unwanted attention from a local karate champion and embarks on a journey to enter the ultimate karate competition with the help of Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso. The film was directed by Jonathan Entwistle and stars Jackie Chan, Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang. The Review So when they first announced this film, it seemed like a good idea because Cobra Kai was all the hype, so it made sense to make a new Karate Kid film. This movie was originally going to be released last year but got delayed to this year, and now that Cobra Kai ended much earlier this year and the hype died off, most people (including myself) forgot that this movie was even coming out. This is a legacy sequel to both the original Karate Kid and the 2010 film starring Jaden Smith. How was this movie exactly you may ask? This was one of the most boring fi...
Read more

Jurassic World: Rebirth - Movie Review

Image
Jurassic World: Rebirth is the latest film in the Jurassic Park franchise and this time it's directed by Gareth Edwards, and stars Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend and many other. So in this film, a team travels to a former research facility on an island to extract samples of things vital for a treatment for heart disease and also rescue a shipwrecked family, but then they struggle to survive as they become stranded on the island and face dinosaurs. I was kind of hopeful for this movie, none of the people behind the previous 3 films were behind this one so this was pretty much like a fresh start. I love Gareth Edwards as a director, and it was back to basics, none of this boring bugs nonsense like the atrocious previous installment Jurassic World: Dominion.   This movie is a dumb, fun monster flick—nothing more, nothing less. It may not be a masterpiece, but when it comes to enjoyable summer entertainment, there are certainly worse options out there. Ga...
Read more