The new Fantastic 4 is a really, really bad film. Dour, gloomy, joyless, bleak, and really really sluggish and dull. It’s 1hr 45min long but feels much longer.

A superhero flick doesn’t have to be bright and fun to be good – I liked the Man of Steel movie a lot and that was pretty joyless… but it also had a good imagination and some amazing action scenes and told a decent story (even if it did walk all over the Superman mythos). At least it had a vision…

Fantastic 4 takes itself far too seriously and takes far too long to even getting around to being a superhero movie (probably 70 minutes into the movie before we even get a fight) so it had better do a good job at being something else. If a superhero movie doesn’t superhero, it needs to be a sci-fi film, a drama, a spy thriller… something. But, no, it’s 60 minutes of scientific setup where very little happens, including character development. Then some more build-up, and then a fight scene. Basically it’s one big origin story setup for a sequel.

Now, to get it out of the way, this is a terrible Fantastic 4 movie as a representation of the comic or even the mediocre two earlier films from the mid 2000s (which were goofy and fun while also being pretty mediocre). The origin story is rewritten into something kind of unexciting and certainly boring to look at, the characters are barely friends much less family (a staple of the series), and Dr. Doom is an abomination of terrible decisions. Seriously, the Doom character starts as a misanthropic hacker and turns into a random villain who is so laughable to look at, it’s hard to take him seriously (much less whatever vague motivation of a threat he represents).

I am not a big fan of the characters or comics and they can do whatever they want to them as long as they do it well. Which they don’t. The movie lumbers and ponders its way to is interdimensional transportation plot… which is done while half-drunk (so much for heroes)… gives us a boring wasteland that makes you wonder what everyone is excited about, and then gives the characters powers (in a very grim and kind of horrifying way). Then it literally jumps forward a year and tells you how awesome they are… frankly that’s the movie I’d have rather seen but the movie skips right over it.

And then they introduce a villain with vague ambitions and “whatever the screenwriter needs for this shot” powers… and there’s a big blowout FX fight scene in a boring wasteland where people are trying to stop the thing from doing this thing that’s going to end the world so throw that guy into that wormhole thing… and then the movie ends. I get kinda what was happening from a script level but I don’t think anyone making the movie really had a good idea what was going on… certainly the FX guys were just taking the money and animating a swirly shaped dimensional portal thing.

Skip this movie. It’s the kind of thing that makes you appreciate that, even if Avengers: Age of Ultron made some mistakes, at least it was a good enough movie. It was trying. This movie makes me think, “What has the Dark Knight wrought”. Maybe we can pull back from the brown and black color palette, turn on some lights, and tell a few jokes. Or, if not that, give us something better thought through, with its own vision.

Score: 56