This is it folks; the rollercoster to unfiltered, unrestricted rage has begun.
As I brought up a bit ago, the 30th of September will be my 6 month anniversary of starting this little review series. As a celebration, I will be bringing reviews of what I consider the absolute worst movies that I've ever seen. They are the bottom of the barrel, the movies that should teach people how NOT to direct, write, produce or act in a movie. If anyone out there likes these movies for whatever reason... I pity you.
Still, keep in mind, that this is all strictly opinion based and will obviously have some bias, as it is only my opinion that is being written on the page. You may disagree at your leisure, but that's not gonna change what you read. Also, they are films that I have actually seen, so you won't be seeing the likes of Howard the Duck, Norm of the North or Troll 2 on here. I know that they are considered some of the worst films of all time, but I don't need to watch them to know how bad they are when entire other films and documentaries have been made about them, most especially Troll 2.
With that said, let's start at Number 5. For a recap, here are the 3 hints that I left last time:
1. It's a superhero movie.
2. It's a Marvel property.
3. This specific property has yet to have an actually good movie.
Now that I think about, I probably should have reworded that last one. It should actually say "It has yet to have any other successful adaptation outside of it's source material". Why, you may ask? Because only one person, Elliot, guessed, his choice being Daredevil. Don't get me wrong; that movie is a piece of shit (including the Director's Cut), but at least we did get a good Daredevil... from Netflix.
But sadly, he was wrong. The Number 5 choice on the Shit List, as well as the worst superhero movie I've ever seen, is:
Fant4stic... I am NOT calling this shithole "Fantastic Four"!
Released in 2015 and directed by Josh Trank, this walking pile of Skrull faeces was yet another example of Marvel's First Family getting fucked over hard in every other medium except for comic books... but even the comics were starting to fuck it up.
For those in need of a history lesson, quick primer; Fantastic Four was essentially Stan Lee's first attempt at creating a superhero family, with the team comprised of Dr Reed Richards (Mr Fantastic), the world's dumbest genius with the ability to stretch his body to insane proportions, his future wife Susan Storm (the Invisible Woman), whose powers are self explanatory, her little brother Johnny (the Human Torch) the team's requisite show-off, and Reed's long time friend Ben Grimm (the Thing), a dude with rock-like skin and a penchant for clobberin' stuff.
There is more to the team's history than that, such as their rogues gallery with villains like Dr Doom and the Mole Man, but that is the general basics that most people going into this movie are likely aware of. However, despite having a reasonably solid, albeit cheesy, set-up with room for character growth, every movie adaptation practically fails at getting the characters to truly leap from the page to the screen. First we had Roger Corman's version from 1994:
It didn't go well.
Then we had the Tim Story version from 2004:
It and it's sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, were only slightly better, but also somewhat worse.
So, with news hitting the net that not only were 20th Century Fox going to go all "dark, gritty reboot" on us, but were also taking inspiration from the widely panned Ultimate run for the team, fans knew that this family was pretty much doomed to never have a good movie unless specifically made by Marvel... thus begging the question of why Fox bother trying to hold on to the rights when they couldn't succeed the first time.
Still, as evident of the 10% score on Rotten Tomatoes as well as the horrible Box Office turnout (even taking into account DVD sales), it's obvious that Fox has pretty much wrote their own names into a Death Note. Thank Carlin that they did Deadpool and Logan the following year.
What's the story?... No seriously, that's my first question; what's the actual story for this movie? Because at first, it's about building a trans-dimensional transporter to a place called Planet Zero, but after about an hour of nothing, it's suddenly about these bland, unemotional schmucks getting superpowers and fighting a dude in a green cloak and a badly photoshopped crash test dummy mask. But see, that's an automatic problem with this film; it can't decide what it wants to be except for the Marvel version of The Dark Knight.
2 things, however. Firstly, we already had that; it's called Winter Soldier. Secondly, why would you want to make the Fantastic Four, a group of bright, colourful superheroes, into another Batman story? The reason that the gritty tone in the Dark Knight trilogy worked was because it was fitting for the character of Batman; a dark, brooding individual who has to deal with psychotic maniacs and clown-faced anarchists. The Fantastic Four, in a superficial sense, is supposed to be silly and fun, capturing the essence of an all American family with superpowers. If all you do is give them a blank, unemotional pile of angst and distrust, then the regular movie-goers will quickly grow tired of seeing these uninteresting schmucks and fans of the source material will be pissed!
This also ties into an even bigger problem with the film. After they have gained their powers and being angsty brats about it, they are pretty much separated from each other. Ben's doing "covert ops" for the military, Johnny's busy just doing stuff with his powers, Sue is trying to rebuild the machine and Reed is a fugitive who ALSO tries to rebuild the machine. Wanna know why this doesn't work? BECAUSE THIS IS MARVEL'S FIRST FAMILY!!! Having them separated for an entire year in film time is a horrible way of presenting the character's who have held that staple since the fucking 1960's. The whole point was seeing these 4 people learning to cope with their powers by coming together as a family unit and working together, helping each other understand how their greatest character strengths will always outweigh their personal character flaws. If you barely show them interacting with each other outside of a science montage and drunken decisions to take the teleporter on a joyride, then how are we, as viewers, supposed to be invested when they do come together to fight Doom?!
Speaking of which, let's actually talk about this villain who pretty much doesn't really show up until the last 15-20 minutes of the movie. Not only is Doom a joke in the final (and only) battle of the film, but even before being turned into Doom, he's a nihilistic, social outcast who is completely condescending to others because... the Kool-Aid man likes red. No, seriously, I have no idea why he's so "Earth is bad so you must feel bad", as they just barely glance over his backstory as a jackass from Latveria who has this unexplored stalker-like obsession with Sue. It ultimately amounts to nothing, so why bother going through with it in the fucking first place?!
And even taking out the connection to the Fantastic Four, what else is there about this film that makes it stand out from the other bad, needlessly dark reboots that completely miss the point of the source material? I talked about this before with the Netflix Death Note movie, so I will just rephrase what I said there. Making the film dark to the point where you use that fucking stupid grey colour palette as a visual eyesore does not make your movie automatically more mature; it comes off as if your just conforming to trends that people already hate and want to see less of because it makes your movie dull, uninteresting and, most importantly, BOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRIIIIIIIING!!!!! Besides, your movie's villain's real name is Victor Von Doom, so you kind of lost the chance of the audience taking you seriously.
Then again, I have a feeling that most of the shit that happened with this movie may be because of Fox and Trank constantly butting heads, with how Fox basically kept on asking for rewrite after rewrite, never being satisfied with the finished product and giving the ultimate "fuck you" to Trank by locking him out of the editing room as they put together the final theatrical cut of the movie. But even if Fox deserves most of the blame for this one, Trank also deserves a fair amount of it, as he was apparently being an utter dick on set, that is if he ever turned up on time, and the conflict between him and the producers led to him taking his anger out on his cast and crew, treating them like shit for no actually good reason. He may have an excuse for being an asshole, but he was still an asshole.
Then again, he did disown the film on Twitter the day before it came out, so what're you gonna do?
Tweets can be deleted, but screen-caps can last forever.
And there is one last thing I want to talk about before I close out this review and leave the hints for the next one. You all remember the Thing's catchphrase "It's clobberin' time!", right? It's simple, but it's also catchy and sticks in peoples' heads... then this movie completely fucked it up! For you see, the origin for the catchphrase is that Ben's abusive, older brother use to say that before whacking Ben over the head... what the actual fuck?! You mean to tell me in all of the executive meddling Fox did; rewrites, re-shoots, re-edits, ALL OF THAT... and they didn't think to cut this scene out?! Again I ask, what the actual fuck?!
As stated earlier, Fant4stic has to be the worst superhero movie I have ever seen. The acting all around is sub-standard (even to other bad superhero movies), the visuals are not interesting, the characters nothing more than blank slates with no personality, the story virtually non-existent, the directing lazy and half-assed and it's more than obvious where the film suffered not only from executive mandate but also from lack of care and effort. Much like the other films on my Shit List, it's not even enjoyably bad; it's a bore to sit through, while also being insulting at the same time.
Overall rating: 1/10 (A Trainwreck).
So, before we close out this review, allow me to leave the next set of clues:
1. It is based on a popular children's show from the 60's.
2. It was released early-mid-2000's.
3. The story it is based on holds a strong spot with my childhood memories.
Let the speculation continue.
Til next time, I'm Callum Lewis, the Media Man... and it only gets worse from here.
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