"Fantastic 4" Is So Plain I Almost Forgot to Review It.

Fantastic 4

You've surely heard by now that Fantastic 4 didn't work out so well. I don't want to dwell on the film or beat a dead horse, but I do want to point out that the film is not the trainwreck that the hyperbolic fanboys of the internet want it to be. Instead, it is utterly forgettable. So forgettable, in fact, that it occurred to me a few days after watching it that I hadn't written a review for it. I'm usually pretty late with my reviews (I don't watch most new movies until Sunday), but I'm always reminding myself to get the review written. This time, I simply forgot. 

Fantastic 4 had all of these behind-the-scenes problems, but despite that, the film is a coherent work. It's when it decides to shoehorn in a "save the world" plot in the last twenty minutes that it loses people. In fact, many have praised the first two-thirds of the film. I disagree. Yes, the "save the world" plot is rushed and not very interesting, but the first two thirds of the film isn't exciting either. It's your standard origin story, but told even more slowly than usual. Maybe it's just that I'm utterly sick of origin stories (Ant-Man might have been the last one I can stomach, but that was because it was a comedy, not a deadly serious movie like Fantastic 4). I get that you have to show how they got their powers, but could you speed it up? The characters aren't presented interestingly enough for the slow plod the film makes to their inevitable transformation. 

That is really all I have to say about this one. There's no need to get into performances because the cast is fine; the characters are the problem. It was all so bland. Heroes get powers. Most don't want powers. Military wants powers. Military bad. Bad man shows up. Beat bad man. Set up the sequel. Granted, that's how most of these movies work, but other movies have more likable characters or humor or life or anything. Despite my vitriol, I still don't think this movie is as bad as people make it out to be. It's simply boring, which is kind of worse than it being outright bad. At least a pathetic attempt at a movie (like the first Fantastic 4 that was made just to keep the rights [incidentally the same reason this one exists]) is fun to make fun of. But this one isn't bad enough to joke about it. Now that is truly bad.

 Fantastic 4 receives a: