Fantastic Four (2015)

Yet again, the Internet was wrong. The Internet was just full of people saying how terrible this movie was and that the producers defiled the very essence of the Fantastic Four in so many ways, but especially by casting Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch/Johnny Storm. Well, the Internet was just plain wrong. This movie wasn't terrible, this movie was super terrible, and Jordan was fine.

Let's start with Miles Teller as Mr. fantastic. I'm not sure why they decided they needed to make this a young adult movie, but they decided they were going to make the Fantastic Four really, really young. Okay, bad direction to go in, but where do we go from here? Well, let's just start off by grabbing somebody who has already been in young adult movies – I know! Let's just grab someone from the Divergent series! And so it was written, and so it was done. Miles is at best a bland actor, and this character was written just as blandly.

On we move to Michael B Jordan, the man who has the gall to show up on set as an African-American. Johnny storm is supposed to be a really charismatic, fun-loving character. It seemed like Michael really tried to play in that way, but he just didn't have a script that could support it. I can't fault his acting, I can only fault the script he was given in the dialogue he was forced to say. The same can be said for Kate Mara and Sue Storm. I know she's a good actress, but she didn't have anything to go with.

Jamie Bell and Toby Kebbell are a couple of also-rans in this movie. This is especially disappointing, as The Thing is a very nuanced character for what Stan Lee originally designed to be the heavy in this group. When you're outdone playing a character made out of stone by Michael Chiklis, it's time to really think about where your career is going and what scripts you've actually read before you signed up to be in the movie.

It seems like the only talent in this movie comes from Reg E. Cathey as Sue and Johnny's father. He also happens to be the guy who's running a pseudo-governmental scientific research group that has been experimenting with quantum realities. Here we start to get into the real crux of the issue – the basic storyline. The original story for the fantastic four was ridiculous. It was a comic book, it was created in 1961, and readers weren't particularly sophisticated at that time. So, you have a group of four friends who go into space, get bombarded with completely not understood "cosmic rays," and all four gain these weird superpowers. Yes, it's stupid, but it's not substantially more stupid than what this movie came up with.

45 minutes in, and we just now found the SuperOoze!

Like a lot of reboots, this movie is essentially an origin story. The problem is, it never really gets past the origin story, and the origin story that it has is pretty stupid. Rather than cosmic rays granting them powers, which would be utterly ridiculous, they go to a different dimension and all get some kind of green superooze (presumably not the same stuff that gave Daredevil the ability to see without his eyes or gave it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles intelligence and skills and an insatiable appetite for pizza) all over them, and this results in the exact same goddamn thing as the cosmic rays would've done.

Direction was bad
Story was bad
Acting was moderate
Dialogue was bad
Effects were actually pretty good (except for the CG monkey)

Bottom Line: I didn't know what it would take for me to appreciate Rise of the Silver Surfer. Now I know.

0.5/5