Fantastic Four (4/10)

It's hard to not call it Craptastic Four at this point because it seems like 20th Century Fox has no idea how to produce a movie worthy of the first Marvel family of superheroes.

I had a lot of faith with this installment. What with the success of the previous few X-Men movies, a great director in Josh Trank, a brilliant young cast and with Simon Kinberg supervising scripting duties. What could go wrong? Everything it seems.

Let's start with the good first. The first half of building up the individual characters (or the potential it presented) was fantastic. Miles Teller looks the part and could have been a great Reed Richards. And that friendship he began to build with Toby Kebbell's Victor Von Doom, which slowly turned into a competition for the affection of Kate Mara's Sue Storm - everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

I even enjoyed the concept of another world or an alternative universe where they had that freak accident. Everything up until that point was great. Everything else from that point onwards went out the window. It's as if Trank just up and left and someone else came in to direct.

A few scenes that we saw in the trailer never even made it into the movie, especially the best part where Jamie Bell's Ben Grimm dropped from a plane and landed on a tank. What happened to that scene?

The scenes in the second half all felt truncated. The story progression barely made sense and the dialogue was reduced to one-liners as expositions. Did Kinberg felt asleep?

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Let me go into some SPOILER territory for a the next two paragraphs.

There were barely any action scenes in the middle. The sequence in the forest was very short and baffling. Reed has been looking for Jamie Bell's Ben Grimm the whole time he was hiding and when they met, there was nothing about that. Why was he even hiding out and trying to build a one-man pod anyway? What was his plan?

And the final showdown was like an amateur B-movie with scenes stitched together, heroes posing for the camera trying to look cool but failing, and a simple fight scene to defeat Doom.

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So a lot of the rumours that came out about how Fox took over the editing process and fired Trank before the movie was done, after watching the movie, it's hard not to believe that's true.

You can also clearly see where the reshoots were: Mara donned a hideous looking blonde wig towards the end. That's probably when shooting has supposedly wrapped and she has changed her hairstyle so much that when the reshoots were ordered, they had no choice but to give her a wig that somehow wasn't even in the same colour. That's how desperate Fox got.

It is such a pity how this movie turned out. I would have very much liked to see how this particular cast evolve throughout the series, which I doubt we're getting now - although Fox hasn't cancelled the planned sequel as of yet.

And I really liked Teller and Michael B. Jordan in their roles. They could have been awesome. I can't say the same for Mara and Bell though as they weren't focused enough. And Kebbell just looked like a jarring miscast to me.

If I were Fox, I'd put these four into X-Men and see where that goes. A sequel at this point would be way too risky.

But what if this movie was not named Fantastic Four and was just another sci-fi horror? Audiences would have been more forgiving but there's no overlooking the horrible ending.