"Fant4stic" Review - From the Vaults

 The new Fantastic Four movie isn't terrible. It's merely frustrating and underwritten, with blandness and train-sized plot-holes galore.

Until they get superpowers.

Then it becomes a truly unholy shit-storm of awfulness.

I'm struggling to remember it, and I only got out of seeing it 10/15 minutes ago. The most accurate review described it as "a 90 minute trailer for a better movie which we never get to see."

It goes without saying that there will be spoilers.

The good points, first of all.

1. Jamie Bell is good. He manages to imbue his character with some semblance of humanity and dignity, until he becomes a rock man, when he's wasted.

2. Michael B. Jordan is charismatic.

Now for the negatives.

The film starts poorly, with 2007 being portrayed as some sort of 1980s downtown Detroit, with the technology levels of post-1940s Berlin. It's really distracting, almost more distracting than Reed Richard's teacher telling him to "get real dreams" after the kid invents a FUNCTIONING TELEPORTATION DEVICE and somehow loses the science fair.

What follows are 20 slightly more promising minutes, where we're introduced to some characters. They just chill out, and they have some sort of quirk or relationship, which makes them interesting somewhat. Though, frustratingly, Jamie Bell is written out for the next half hour. But all of the interesting character development happens off-screen, and the characters never really go anywhere. It's like we're being teased with characters we're already supposed to know, whose great "development" (I shit you not) happens in a montage.

When the machine is built (thanks largely to the inexplicably genius Reed and the dickish Dr Doom, being played as a creepy, 90s movie hacker) there is actually a nice moment when the gang are told that their work is done and that the government will be bringing in NASA, because it's more professional. This is a surprisingly good twist, then immediately ruined when they get bladdered and decide to go in anyway, which obviously works because there is no security here, and they sober up immediately (after inviting Jamie Bell back into the movie, thankfully).

The powers are played out like a budget David Cronenberg movie, in that everybody's bodies go through horrifying transformations (Less "The Human Torch", more "The Human Corpse"), but before the consequences of this are felt, we have a time jump.

The movie never really recovers from the jarring shift in tone, despite throwing together a load of other things to the pot in a desperate attempt to make it interesting (war movie, redemption arc, attempts at dialogue and relationships, and Tim Blake Nelson's surprisingly reasonable Government agent) but it never has ambition, or a goal, or any sort of depth or ideas.

Until Dr Doom shows up.

Then it goes from bland to "The most horrifying lurch in tone since Miracle Mile" when we get exploding heads, mass murder, and deaths of most of the supporting cast in a surprisingly good, dark sequence which would not be amiss in a horror film. But even then, this is brief, and the film remembers that it's supposed to be a superhero movie, and trudges reluctantly to a finale of boredom, where they arbitrarily decide to become a team and face off against Doom, whose powers are "What the Plot Requires", with us never having gotten to know what their powers, dynamics or personalities are really.

The Fantastic Four are a zany, intergalactic group of buddies with ridiculous powers.

They are NOT "kid geniuses" in a pathetic attempt at "grounded realism" and "dark and edgy" storytelling, which comes across as mere nastiness, where Trank (who made a good movie in "Chronicle") was given the wrong property, the wrong direction and the wrong script.

It's not even "so bad it's good". Just don't watch it. It falls flat on its face.