Fantastic Four

I see wasted potential. Almost Cronenberg elements of Richards’ imprisonment, exploding heads, freakish mutations. Damn! We might have had something here. So we have a product here that the studio took away from the director, changed it (badly) into a kind of hybrid kids’ and adult movie which stops making sense in the second half, throwing the “popular" opening that took so much hard work into the trash. The actors is fine, the best of all being Michael B. Jordan’s hated human torch. He has a great time as Johnny. Teller is very fine in the role of the weird nerd and fear stricken scientist, but Mr. Fantastica is a long way away from the original character. Bell stays in the background, any action involving the Thing is cut ruthlessly and Kate Mara is a fox, but has terribly little room to perform. Toby Kebbell is super just occasionally, and as Doctor Killjoy (or whatever his name is) is extremely flat and what he does makes no sense = almost unexplained. For one of the most clever villains this is too little. I really don’t know what they thought they were doing, but the studio should have left the movie in Trank’s hands and tried it using his vision, whatever it was, and it would have been better than this mongrel (even scenes from the trailers are missing) that is saved from mediocrity only by one or two good ideas. (12/08/2015)

This is a film with zero ambition and it has no idea whether it wants to be a party of geeks gifted with superpowers or a comic thriller about an unexpected gift from another dimension. It’s a dramaturgically-muddled mess in which nothing works, especially the foursome itself. The origins of the heroes are referenced through futile dialogue and with zero chemistry, so it’s pretty loose, although a few heads do surprisingly explode at the end. Trank has created a movie without a face, and I only half believe all the crying over Fox's intervention. It's clear that it was heavily edited, but if a group is called the Fantastic Four... (13/08/2015)

An old-fashioned, very good film that took a different path than the current comic book wave, which hasn't been used in a few years, and unfortunately it backfired. Most viewers probably wanted to see something else, but I enjoyed Fantastic Four without shame. In my opinion, there's actually nothing wrong with it - the viewer cares about the likeable characters, the science-boy atmosphere gradually transitions smoothly into a big adventure, the special effects are great, and the terrific music by Marc Beltrami and Philip Glass is one of the best to come out of the comic book soundtrack genre in years. It's a shame that we probably won't see any sequel(s). (23/12/2015)

I don't like comic book films about heroes with superpowers because I consider them to be heavily infantile and their audience clearly belongs to a different age category than mine. But even within what comic books work with and strive for, Fantastic Four tragically fails. It amounts to sterile boredom, where all attempts at dramatic transcendence fail and where it lacks even what its genre colleagues possess, namely exciting action and plenty of special effects. The ratio of investment to result here is catastrophic. Overall impression: 10%. (04/02/2018)

In this case, I really don't understand why they started something again here. Just so that Johnny Storm could be black and the whole comic family could be more politically correct? This is just nonsense and, moreover, the whole movie is a terribly ridiculous construct, as if the creators were returning to the foundations of the comic, but didn't realize that this would only be a forced attempt. (30/10/2015)