My Review of Fantastic Four (2015)

Written by Jeremy Slater And Simon Kinberg And Josh Trank

Directed by Josh Trank 

Reed: "Victor, don't do this!"

Victor: "There is no Victor... there is only Doom!"

Oh dear. After a rather fun duology for this group in the 2000s, the 2010s were less kind to them. This one movie really felt like such a setback that even if their upcoming MCU isn't a slam dunk, it's already a step from this epic misfire.

I've seen plenty of mediocre and downright bad superhero movies but this movie managed to miscast four leads who've been generally good in other projects but here are rather devoid of chemistry and felt completely wrong for the parts. Mainly because they're all too young for the roles they've been cast in.

Anyways social outcasts Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) become fast friends due to being social outcasts and having terrible families. They also bonded over a project that allowed them to potentially teleport.

That particular project attracted the attention of the government and in particular, Dr Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and soon both Reed and Ben were working under Franklin and the latter's gifted children, Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny (Michael B. Jordan). Oh and massively disliked genius, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel) for good measure.

Soon enough, you've got scientific advancements going awry and the group (and Victor) ended up with their usual power set. Only Reed decided to abandon the group and it took both Ben and Sue to get him help out with a much bigger problem. Of course that problem would be Doom.

Yes, another movie with this group and Doom as the main villain and try as he did, Toby Kebbel really failed to deliver any menace or campy fun to the iconic baddie. Of course when Doom did get defeated and the group managed to leverage their own freedom from the government, there was the issue of coming up with a decent name.

- There's no Stan Lee cameo or mid/post credit scene with this movie.

- Michael B. Jordan would later go on to play Kilmonger in the Black Panther movies for the MCU while co-writer Jeremy Slater would take on Moon Knight for Disney+.

- It seems like both Josh Trank and Jeremy Slater had very different ideas in how to handle this movie with Simon Kinberg having to rewrite the script.

- Chronology: 2007, 2014 and 2015 in New York, Central City and Central America.

There's no denying that this version of Fantastic Four might be as far from fantastic as you can get. It's an absolute mess of a movie, very much miscast with it's leads and visually unappealing from start to finish. There's nothing good I can say about this one.

Rating: 4 out of 10