I had the 2015
Fantastic Four, or as it is colloquially known:
Fant4stic, logged on Letterboxd but I had only seen it in chunks, never the full movie from beginning to end. I thought that surely it couldn't be as bad as I remembered and as everyone on the planet says it is. I was actually right. It's somehow worse.
Not a single thing about this movie works. I guess if you want to play Devil's advocate (the frowned-upon role of defending this garbage heap of a movie) you could say that
some of the CGI is impressive. I'm primarily talking about Reed's nasty, realistic stretching abilities and a few of the environments. That's it, not remotely enough to give this movie 1 star because the rest of the visual effects are an eye sore.
The acting is atrocious despite the strong cast. I know that Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan are talented because both have given incredible performances in movies prior (
Whiplash and
Fruitvale Station just to name a few). Kate Mara doesn't quite have as strong of a legacy as the two I just mentioned, but I think she does the best job here. Jamie Bell is one of those actors that you've seen a billion times but you couldn't guess his name if your life depended on it. He does fine but is forgotten about for 75 percent of the movie. It's just so painfully obvious, especially in the disastrous second half, that nobody's heart is in
Fant4stic whatsoever.
Speaking of that last half, it's laughably bad. Nothing happened during the first excruciatingly boring first half and when the second comes around they realized "oh, we're supposed to be wrapping things up pretty soon" and just started haphazardly slapping cliche plot elements together with half-assed performances and dialogue that never saw a rough draft. They forgot that Dr. Doom was a character that exists and tossed him in just to get defeated by a shiny glowy thingy which leads me to my next point.
Nothing makes sense in this movie. It's a super hero flick, a shitty one at that, but it helps if they at least try to make some sort of sense out of the things that are happening. Nearly every scene that has something outlandish going on has no explanation and we just have to take it at face value. The alternate universe, their powers, the black hole, the "energy source", how Doom does literally anything, nothing makes any sense.
The characters are meant to be younger interpretations of the classic F4 characters that everyone's familiar with which is fine, but considering how important these people are to literally the entire world and how smart everyone makes them seem, they sure are stupid. There's the argument to be made that there's no conflict if a few mistakes aren't made here and there, but I simply cannot believe these characters are geniuses when most of the things they do and say are typical of morons.
To top things off, it's just plain boring. At least some of the other less than good Marvel movies have some catalyst of enjoyment in them. This one lacks life, joy, and any shred of fun.
Without a doubt the worst Marvel movie I have watched up to this point. Would not recommend this to my worst enemy.
List: ***
Marvel Ranked &
2015 Ranked***
Last Review: ***
Caught Stealing***
