By Brett Blake FANTASTIC FOUR is a failure on multiple levels. It marginally fails as a compelling science fiction yarn even when disconnected from its source material, and it really fails as an adaptation of said source material. In its quest to be a supposedly “realistic” interpretation of its Marvel comic book parent, it is a (mostly) humorless, grim, chore of a watch, almost totally lacking in charm, excitement, or vitality, and while it is not aggressively bad, and unworthy of hatred, it leaves many things to be desired. The story revolves around Reed Richards (Miles Teller), a brilliant young student-scientist who is given a scholarship to the prestigious Baxter Foundation. While there, he meets Sue and Johnny Storm (Kate Mara and Michael B. Jordan), as well as Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), and together they collaborate on building an interdimensional teleportation device. A catastrophic accident during a test of the device leaves them all - along with Reed’s childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) - imbued with a variety of strange and incredible powers, and it then falls upon Reed, Johnny, Sue, and Ben to deal both with the government (which wants to use their abilities for shadowy purposes) and Doom, who has been driven insane by his newfound powers. That basic synopsis is - I guarantee - more exciting than the actual movie is. The decision (made by director Josh Trank and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater) to take a property that literally contains the word “Fantastic” in its title and ground it in a realistic and (so-called) “gritty” tone is completely baffling. It’s as if the filmmakers looked at the material and said, “This stuff is great! Now let’s change everything!” It’s really bizarre, and it smacks of either the studio or the filmmakers being embarrassed by the gleefully vibrant color and weirdness of the comic book. The movie discards just about everything that made the original comic unique in favor of a plodding, poorly-paced narrative (the editing is downright sloppy at times; momentum never builds, scenes flow into each other strangely, etc.) and a dour, generic visual style. Narratively, the screenplay dictates that this should not only be an origin story, but an origin story that literally takes the entire film to get the characters into a position even remotely resembling their comics counterparts. It’s a whole 100 minutes of origin, and while it’s admirable on one level to give the characters breathing room as they deal with their new abilities, this is, frankly, overkill. Almost all of the actors are stranded by the screenplay, which does the bare minimum to build up the core relationships; Jordan attempts to liven things up at points, but most of these attempts fall flat, while Mara and Bell are given virtually nothing to work with, despite playing characters that should be - on paper - very compelling. Kebbell does the best he can with a preposterously ill-considered character (more on that in a moment), but only Teller truly feels like an engaged and likable presence, and even he doesn’t have much in the way of a character arc. There are some nice moments to be found, particularly the wonderful prologue involving young Reed and Ben experimenting as kids, but aside from that there is little sense of joy, or awe, or wonder. Even in the moments of grand scientific discovery, which are technically well-shot, the tone makes everything feel like a slog. The scale of the story is also curiously small; until we reach the (totally rubbish, utterly nonsensical, overly bombastic) CGI meltdown of a finale, there is little in the way of action or excitement, much less anything resembling fun. Keep in mind, this is a story about a man who can fly and turn his whole body into flames, another man who can contort and stretch himself into any configuration, a woman who can turn invisible and project force fields, and a giant rock monster. These are characters that lend themselves to big, vibrant action, but there is very little of that present in this movie before the climax. The only sequence that has any juice or vitality to it is the one depicting the accident that gives the characters their powers - it is staged like a horror film, and is truly effective and scary, but nothing else in the movie even comes close to it, making it an outlier. The most egregious misstep the movie makes is in the handling of its villain, Victor Von Doom. If one sets aside the enormously significant heritage of the Doctor Doom character from the comic books, this film’s version of Doom is - at least for the first half of the movie - mildly interesting and compellingly acted by Kebbell, but he’s not at all Doom from the comics, so why even use that name? In this fourth iteration of the FANTASTIC FOUR property on film, Hollywood still hasn’t gotten the character right; they’ve taken what is arguably the most operatic, grandiose, and fascinating villain in the Marvel stable and stripped him of everything that makes him so cool and formidable. When Kebbell’s Doom finally tips over into arch-villainy in the (very rushed) third act, it is massively underwhelming. Kebbell is a very good actor, and - as I said - his early moments in the film are strong(ish), but when called upon to portray one of the great iconic comic villains in full regalia (or at least as close to full regalia as this “grounded” and “realistic” take allows, which is to say not close at all), he’s left adrift by the script, which forces him to utter dialogue of the ridiculously bad sort and to behave in ways that are completely unmotivated and inadequately set-up. None of the comic character’s gravitas, ego, or calculating intellect shine through. Now look, nobody's saying filmmakers need to be totally beholden to comic books from 50 years ago, but to squander a rich character like Doom by turning him into a void of personality is nothing less than a huge miscalculation. And so it is with the movie as a whole. The filmmakers here clearly had good intentions. Though a darkish take on the material is a questionable move, it is not a cynical one. It is a pure film, very clearly the one the filmmakers set out to make (at least tonally), and that is admirable on a certain level. It strives to have a soul and a distinct point-of-view, even if the execution therein is massively misguided… which it surely is. At the end of the day, FANTASTIC FOUR is a portrait of mediocrity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|