Okay, so it’s not the worst superhero film ever made, nor is it as awful as its RT score indicates, but it’s still bad. Much like the girl I was hoping for a second date with recently, I ended up sorely disappointed.
Essentially, the film’s a reboot of the franchise after two awful previous films from a decade or so ago. The four consist of: Reed Richards (Miles Teller), a gifted young scientist, Sue Storm (Kate Mara), a gifted young female scientist, Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), Sue’s brother, who’s not a gifted scientist, but who’s good at building stuff, and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Reed’s friend who just kind of became his assistant (not a scientist either). They all gain their powers after teleporting to an alternate universe and things going wrong. Another guy working on the project, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) gets trapped in the alternate universe, becomes evil, and the four must stop him in like the last 10 minutes of the film (no joke).
The main problem with this film is that there’s so much exposition and set-up. Sure, it helps us to get reacquainted with the characters again, but it’s overdone here. Also, the character development/backstory is super uneven. Reed and Ben are given a lot more backstory than Sue and Johnny. Reed and Ben becoming friends at a young age was an interesting idea, but the circumstances in which they became friends felt super contrived. They went to the same school? Ben’s family just so happens to own a junkyard, the very same one that Reed breaks into to steal a part for his teleporter, and Ben just happens to run across him that same night? What a coincidence! As for Sue and Johnny, we learn Sue was adopted by Johnny’s father, Frank Storm (Reg E. Cathey), and that’s really all there is, they never explain why she was adopted. As for Johnny, we’re given a brief scene that demonstrates he’s a bad boy, complete with a drag race in which he crashes and is later criticized by his father in such a clichéd matter. And as for Victor, he’s not given a lot of backstory or development either. He’s merely disgruntled and hesitantly agrees to come aboard to work on the project. Tim Blake Nelson also appears, reminding you that he was in a much better Marvel film, The Incredible Hulk years ago.
In addition to the lack of payoff for all the set-up, there isn’t any chemistry between any of these characters. It seems like they were attempting to build up Sue and Reed romantically, but it all felt so forced and awkward that it just didn’t work. Sue and Johnny don’t feel like brother and sister at all. Victor is an underdeveloped villain as I pointed out before, and Ben just feels like Reed’s buddy and not one who should’ve been brought into the equation at all. Because of the film’s running time (only like 100 mins), everything feels rushed before any good chemistry is allowed to spark.
As far as the tone goes, I like how it wasn’t cheesy and stupid like the previous two films, but the grounded and gritty nature of it didn’t quite work. It worked well when Nolan rebooted the Batman series, but these aren’t the kind of characters that it works for. They’re supposed to be colorful and fun, not downbeat and brooding. The film tried to have it both ways too with some humorous and lighter dialogue at certain points, but again, it felt forced and didn’t work.
While I give writer/director Josh Trank credit for trying to do something new with these characters, it feels very much like a failed experiment. A flawed film that explores only the origins of these characters and does nothing else just doesn’t cut it. Perhaps Trank was simply giving us a little taste and putting more into the sequel? Who knows if a sequel will happen now with poor critical reception and potentially poor box office returns, and quite frankly, who cares?
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