Nothing ‘Fantastic’ to be found

Posted on August 14, 2015

By MARK VIOLA

Since Marvel Comics got into the movie-making business with 2008’s “Iron Man,” it has been on a stellar streak, producing 11 great movies with, in my opinion, only one miss (“Iron Man 2”).

But not all films based on Marvel Comic are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and are instead produced by companies which had already secured those movie rights, namely Sony with Spider-Man and 20th Century Fox with the X-Men and Fantastic Four. Those studios have to keep producing new movies or lose their rights to the characters, which would then return to Marvel. In the case of the Fantastic Four, which had two big-screen adaptations in 2005 and 2007, Fox waited until the very last moment to get its new rebooted “Fantastic Four” film into production before losing the rights once and for all.

Well, having seen the utter mess of a movie that director Josh Trank (“Chronicle”) made, it probably would have saved Fox a lot of time and bad feelings if they’d just let the rights lapse.

Between a lazy script, horrible pacing, a shoe-horned villain and a major plot device that is never explained, we have something that resembles a comic-book movie, but made by someone who seemingly had never actually seen one.

You can’t spend half of your movie setting up character development only to skip over the payoff. You can’t create a giant action blockbuster based on a story where everything that happens is because of a never-explained glowing rock. You also can’t create a giant action blockbuster with almost no action to speak of. You can’t take an iconic villain and turn him into an angsty hipster with anger-control issues. Well, apparently you can do all of those things, and in one movie no less, but the result is going to be downright horrible. And I have the proof.

The movie is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language.

(This is a shortened version of the full review available in our printed or e-edition papers.)

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