by Ed Travis
Poor Josh Trank.
You kind of have to feel for the guy. Together with writer Josh Landis he crafted one of the best found footage films ever made in Chronicle. That it was something of a geek-friendly superhero tale and made crazy profit over its budget placed Trank in a position to be handed the keys to the kingdom. Given the chance to reboot the stalled Fantastic Four franchise, and even given the director’s chair for an upcoming Star Wars film, he was publically removed from the Star Wars gig after reports of turmoil on the production of Fantastic Four. And boy, does that turmoil seem to play itself out on the big screen in the final theatrical version of Fox’s Fantastic Four.
One can almost see what Trank was going for, and perhaps some of the ideas at play here could have been successful or interesting. The casting of the film certainly caused a stir, and was easily the most exciting element of this new reboot. If the casting could be so exciting, perhaps the story could be also? Alas, hopeful fans, you’d do well to set aside any high hopes you might have had for this film. Because outside of the casting, which had such huge potential, and a few character moments that manage to land, Fantastic Four is a roundly inert and pedestrian affair.
While no one will ever likely know the honest extent of the conflict between Trank and the studio, Fantastic Four has a tone-deafness, replete with wild mood swings, that feels exactly like a movie without a true captain at the helm. Much of the dialog and character work feels aimed at kids, with Johnny Storm’s motivation for working on the science team that would eventually become the Fantastic Four involving getting his allowance back so he can re-build a Toyota street racer (as just the most egregious example of how young-skewing this feels). But just as you start to settle in to the idea that this is simply geared towards younger kids or targeted at the Young Adult fiction market, the third act rolls around and people’s heads start exploding on screen, and tonal whiplash becomes unavoidable.
Fantastic Four could perhaps have survived feeling like a captainless ship if it had delivered on virtually any other front. But sadly this is a sci-fi film with no brains, an action film with no excitement, a teamwork film with no chemistry, and aside from the promising casting, there’s simply nothing to grasp onto.
The screenplay from Trank, Jeremy Slater, and Simon Kinberg places a lot of emphasis on the youthful, human scientists who form the core of the tale. And the first half of the film is easily the more engaging half, before super powers and studio demands for a giant finale force their way in nonsensically. There’s a budding connection felt between all of the leads, complete with some moments of camaraderie that border on touching. But as soon as that fateful interdimensional transport sequence happens, the script loses all steam. Maybe the script would have had more impact had the editing been successful, but the editing work from Eliot Greenberg (who worked on Chronicle), and Stephen E. Rivkin (who worked on much bigger films, such as Avatar and the Pirates Trilogy) is flat and lifeless and even confusing at times.
But an editor can only create so much magic with the elements they are handed. And however much studio interference or other issues may have been present, ultimately director Josh Trank was simply unable to craft a successful or engaging film here. Miles Teller (Reed Richards), Kate Mara (Sue Storm), Michael B. Jordan (Johnny Storm), Jamie Bell (Ben Grimm), and Toby Kebbell (Victor Von Doom), are all actors I actively enjoy and consider to be some of the great potential up and coming talent for the next generation of films. They’ve done great work in the hands of other directors. Jordan has done great work at the hands of Trank himself in Chronicle. But here Trank seems to have been unable to coax great work out of his talented cast; every performance is lifeless and non-dimensional (ironic given the inter-dimensional nature of the film). Dialog is delivered poorly, and jokes that might have otherwise landed are rendered eye-roll-inducing.
The direction is just as inert as the performances. There are painfully few big action set pieces to be found, and when they do occur they’re devoid of thrills or excitement. The final sequence, unfortunately set around making a giant blue beam stopping shooting up into the sky (a trope that’s become superhero movie cliche ten times over by this point), is rushed, lacking in rules, logic, or motivation, and manages to also be visually confusing and borderline unfollowable, despite not being particularly complicated.
There’s no sense of awe or wonder at the discovery of another dimension, or really any of the amazing powers and abilities our heroes gain. The superhero element feels almost tacked on, and isn’t helped by a “one year later” jump that feels unearned and does the characters no favors at all. And when the audience is finally transported to that dimension which nobody seems to be losing their minds over, we’re treated to dull, lifeless, green screen filler. When Guardians Of The Galaxy makes you believe a whole movie could be set in any number of the locations that film foisted on us (a colony inside the head of a long-deceased celestial being, anyone?), Fantastic Four simply must do better than to take place almost entirely in a boring lab set and a green screen sound stage. The film looks cheap and visually boring, but likely wasn’t cheap at all.
As an unabashed fan of Chronicle, I’ll keep pulling for Josh Trank. The multi-talented cast will almost certainly make it through this movie with their promising careers un-phased. Studio and crews will move on to other projects. I genuinely feel like Trank has the most to lose here, and I hope he’s able to pull his career out of tale spin and keep making movies. But when it comes to Fantastic Four, 20th Century Fox and Josh Trank have delivered a painfully mediocre picture which aimed squarely at hitting all four quadrants and failed to hit any of them.
And I’m Out.