The second scene of Fantastic Four opens on a shot of a red neon sign reading “Grimm”, panning down slowly to a scrapyard packed with exhausted husks of old vehicles that have long outlived their usefulness. If you were to reduce Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four down to a single shot, that would be it; the purest possible distillation of this hundred-minute effort to adapt Marvel’s (literal) first family to the silver screen. It is possible to make a good Fantastic Four film, even if the movies bearing the family’s name suggest otherwise; The Incredibles proved as much.
What is remarkable about Fantastic Four is just how thoroughly and meticulously the edges have been sanded down, replaced with a misshapen grey blob that wants to be X-Men or The Avengers, or anything but what it is. All the moving parts of the film are compelling on their own merits. This is the first studio effort from Josh Trank. It is a vehicle for Miles Teller. It has a soundtrack from Philip Glass (and Marco Beltrami). It features Victor Von Doom in an era when studios have demonstrated they are not afraid of comic book tropes and absurdities.
Fantastic finish?
Fantastic Four effortlessly squanders just about all that good will in a ruthlessly efficient manner, a demonstration of how brutal a bad script and a cynical edit can be. Trank only fleetingly shines through, commandeering the film for about ten minutes in the middle. Miles Teller is reduced to an exposition machine. Any unique identifiers on the Philip Glass soundtrack are pared down for generic superhero movie bombast. The film is so concerned that the audience won’t take a character named Doctor Doom seriously that he’s barely in the film.
The most interesting aspect of Fantastic Four is the recurring sense that the characters themselves openly resent the direction that the project took. Sadly, even Reed Richards cannot stretch far enough to bend the film back into shape.
Clobbering time…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: comic books, doctor doom, fantastic four, film, Fox, Franchising, marvel, non-review review, reed richard, review, x-men | 14 Comments »
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