Cinemavenger

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Fantastic Four

You get three strikes in baseball, four downs in football and 30 seconds to take a shot in basketball.  Shouldn't there be a rule that if you make four movies about the same group of superheroes and each one pegs the needle on the shit-ometer, it's time to call it a fucking day?

Give up, Hollywood.  It's official.  The Fantastic Four is unfilmable.  It's simply not meant to exist on the big screen.  The proof is in the spandex-clad pudding.

Roger Corman took a whack at Marvel's first family of freaks back in 1994, and the result was so far from fantastic that it was never even released.

The 2005 version starring pre-Captain America Chris "Bob" Evans, Ioan "Billy Goat" Gruffudd, Jessica "No Nudity Clause" Alba and a fat/rock suit inhabited by Michael "Chiclets" Chiklis failed on virtually every level, but expectations for it were so low that it managed to spawn the 2007 sequel, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was so awesome it killed the franchise.

And then came Fantastic Four, an attempted reboot so tedious it makes watching paint dry seem like the Super Bowl, the World Cup and coke-fueled rock star sex all rolled into one.

Seriously, Fantastic Four is the dry, white toast of movies.  It has all the excitement and suspense of a dial tone.  It has less emotion than a robot chess match.  It has fewer ups and downs than an Ohio road.  It's director's last name is Trank, and if I knew that was short for "tranquilizer" I would have skipped the fucker.

It's one thing to tell the same origin story one more millionth time, but Fantastic Four isn't so much an origin story as it is a prequel to itself.  It's more than halfway over before Reed Richards (Miles "Penn &" Teller), Sue Storm (Kate "Scarlett O'" Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. "Goode" Jordan) and Ben Grimm (Jamie "Liberty" Bell) accidentally acquire their super powers.  Their putative nemesis, Dr. Doom (Toby Kebbell "And Bits"), doesn't show up until minute 80 of 100, and the "climactic" battle between the Four and Doom takes less time than a high school virgin blowing his first load.

Every line of dialogue is delivered in the same low-volume monotone.  Richards and company don't even sound excited when they're about to take a joyride to another fucking dimension!  A dimension, by the way, that time and the F/X budget apparently forgot, because it looks like a leftover set from the original Star Trek TV show.

It's not a stretch to say Fantastic Four is one of the worst movies of 2015.  It might as well be invisible.  Someone should put a torch to it.  The thing is, that would probably be too kind a fate.

Fantastic Four is an asstastic bore.