Fant4stic (2015)

By now, the critical consensus is in – hovering in the high single digits on Rotten Tomatoes, Fant4stic is a fantastic flop (or, in a pun I wish I’d thought up, a fantastic bore). Entering the critical conversation on a Monday puts me in a weird position, with the benefit of hindsight beside my keyboard. I’ll try to nuance my stance on Fant4stic, but I’m closer to the 90% who didn’t like it than the ten or so who did; it’s an uneven and occasionally bizarre experience that seems to want its audience held at arm’s length.

Look, you know the story – super genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller), his pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), and polar opposite siblings Sue and Johnny Storm (Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan) find themselves the bearers of incredible abilities after a teleportation to another dimension goes awry. In this version of the story, the abrasive Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), their future nemesis, joins them in the experiment but with only his own interests in mind.

Here’s the biggest problem with Fant4stic (and it’s not the clunky stylization of the title): there are the beginnings of enough good ideas in here to power what should have been a very engaging and unique superhero film. Instead, we have a movie that is substantially less than the sum of its parts, a collision of half-baked notions assaulted by an apparent disdain for the very existence of the superhero genre. The traditional superheroics comprise maybe eight minutes of the film, played off unconvincingly when the characters decide to become heroes purely out of generic conventions. That is, the characters only decide to become superheroes because they’re in a superhero film; in any other genre, I can’t believe these characters would have made that choice.

The thing is, I don’t think these characters are actually The Fantastic Four, as much as the movie hopes to convince us that they are by the time the credits roll. Teller is quite good at conveying the awkwardness that comes with Reed’s immense intellect, but I don’t sense the leadership skills that Reed ought to possess. Perhaps the best casting decision is Jordan’s Human Torch, whose natural showmanship suits the character quite well, and perhaps his confidence would have been played up more in the sequel that now may never come to pass.

The other two, Mara and Bell, are actually quite dull, which is really disappointing considering that the orange rock monster ought to be the most interesting part of any Fantastic Four film. (Michael Chiklis, we hardly knew ye.) And let’s not say much about the film’s handling of Doctor Doom because, again, this isn’t Doctor Doom. This Doom is a petulant demi-hacker who only nails the character’s signature ego after a bizarre attempt to explain away the fact that the comic book character wears a head-to-toe metallic suit.

There are, in fact, a few moments that induce whiplash in the audience as our heads collectively boggle at the inexplicable narrative shifts Fant4stic takes. The film actually gets off to a great start, getting it note-perfect when it introduces Reed as a boy genius who’s proud to be labeled “insane” by those who don’t understand him. But the film drags its feet en route to the superpowers, and once the team has acquired their dysmorphic abilities the movie jumps forward a year, presumably so director Josh Trank didn’t have to show us how the four mastered their abilities – in short, what makes them fantastic in the first place.

Even setting aside Trank’s peculiar tweet-then-delete casting shade on Fant4stic, one senses that he really wanted to make a different film here. I detect no passion in the film’s obligatory climactic battle (which seems ripped straight from the vastly superior Big Hero 6), but there’s a wonderful invocation of David Cronenberg’s The Fly during the moments of physical transformation. Kudos to Reg E. Cathey as Franklin Storm for conveying that blend of wonder and revulsion so central to the subgenre of body horror.

The film is at its most content – and most compelling – when it’s focusing on the horrible things that happen to these reclusive scientists. But when it comes to the superhero aspects of the story, the film absolutely fails to introduce Mister Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch, and The Thing. In fact, the final scene of the film is a real groaner in which the characters propose their superhero codenames with a perplexing self-loathing, as if Trank and company are legitimately embarrassed to have made a superhero film. If you want to do a body horror superhero film, I say fantastic! The best superhero films seem to be the ones that mash-up preexisting genres with the conventions of a superhero tale. Just don’t pull your punches and then cave in to the genre while wearing your utter contempt on your sleeve. Everyone comes out disappointed there.

In other words, make mine Marvel.

Fant4stic is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence, and language.” Some of the displays of the team’s respective superpowers are played first for fear, but audiences quickly become acclimated to them. Doom telekinetically explodes several heads, with surprisingly bloody results for a PG-13. Language consists mostly of a few uses of “the brown word.”