I just saw the latest Fantastic Four movie and it doesn’t seem as though that fact deserves its own thread. So I thought I’d make a thread to bitch about crummy movies you’ve seen lately. That said:
They played the latest FF on the plane last night and I was sufficiently bored that I plugged in my earphones and suffered through the movie. With the possible exception of the special effects for the Human Torch, the whole movie was a steaming mass of cliches, crappy dialog, and actors who clearly wished they were anywhere other than on the set. I’m not sure we needed another FF origin story, but I’m quite certain this wasn’t the one we needed.
First of all, we get to start with the team members as teenagers, possibly to appeal to the young movie going public – a ploy that would have worked better if any of the actors had a scrap of charisma. This means that we get to trot out the “16 year old super genius who blows shit up in a hilarious fashion” cliche. He has a best friend who glowers a lot. Johnny Storm is a charmingly rebellious (black) hot rodder who gets co-opted into helping work on the interdimensional portal as penance for wrecking his car. This leads to the one amusing exchange in the movie. After Sue Storm has repeatedly bitched out Reed Richards for shoddy engineering of his prototype that could have collapsed into a black hole and destroyed the world, Reed asks Johnny if he can weld. “Sure,” 17 year old Johnny says. Super responsible Johnny is now welding together the superstructure for a device that can destroy the world if it fails.
OK, fine, this is all clunky and expositional as it could possibly be, but eventually all the boys hop in the interdimensional bumper car and, apparently, aggravate the crap out of some super-intelligent energy being. Which…eh, grants them random super powers. OK, don’t know why that would happen, but it’s vaguely more satisfying that just blaming it on cosmic rays. Cue about ten minutes of poorly illuminated angst while the powers manifest. Suddenly it’s a year later and everybody hates everyone else. The scriptwriters now realize that they’ve pissed away well over half the movie without actually entertaining anyone, so they rip off a few scenes from The Incredible Hulk to get the band back together.
They open the portal to the other dimension again and, hey, look, it’s our buddy Victor! Not actually looking all that good. And he kind of wants to destroy the Earth. Cue the CGI special effects and an epic battle which depends critically on the fact that the guy who apparently has complete control over matter and energy and who just vaporized thirty human beings by thinking at them forgets that he can do this when punched in the face by a stretchy guy.
Then we get a cheesy five minute denouement which reveals to the disillusioned audience that this was all a setup for future franchise movies (but we knew that) and the credits roll.
And yet, strangely, this movie succeeded in one specific way. It made me nostalgic for the skillful acting chops of Jessica Alba.