Fantastic Four (2015)

There had been an attempt at a Fantastic Four movie in the 1990s, but the ones that really mattered were the two from the 2000s.  Fantastic Four managed to rake in some decent dough so, despite horrible reviews and fan backlash, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer followed in 2007.  It didn't do as well, but well enough that another sequel was being talked about.  This was before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing. 

The sequel, of course, never happened.  Chris Evans got poached by Marvel Studios for Captain America: The First Avenger, Jessica Alba decided to pull back from acting and Michael Chiklis went back to being a character actor on television, finishing up The Shield and playing a significant role in the fourth season of American Horror Story.  The problem was 20th Century Fox still wanted to make money off the franchise and only had until 2014, with a release date of 2015, to do so before the rights went back to Marvel, meaning that Disney (who had not yet acquired Fox) would get their hands on it.  Fox was even offered a deal that they could keep the rights to Daredevil if they turned over Fantastic Four, but they didn't take it, allowing Marvel Studios to make a successful streaming series with that property.  

Thus, Fox decided to make another go at the Fantastic Four, hiring director Josh Trank.  He had made a well-received superhero film with Chronicle and, at the time, was being tapped by Lucasfilm to direct a Boba Fett movie.  Trank worked on a script conceived by Jeremy Slater, one that would Dr. Doom, Galactus and the Mole Man as the villains, with numerous set pieces and action scenes that, even though not exactly faithful to the comics, had the potential for thrilling audiences and taking the material seriously, something Tim Story didn't do with his two movies.  Instead, due to underfunding the film, corner cutting and studio interference, as well as bad behavior on set by Trank, Fantastic Four did such poor business that it lost the studio 100 million dollars and got Rupert Murdoch angry enough to pop out of his lair.

Reed Richards (Owen Judge) is a precocious boy building a teleportation machine in his garage.  A classmate, Ben Grimm (Evan Hanneman), becomes interested in what Richards is doing when he catches his Richards steeling parts at his family's junkyard.  10 years later Richards (Miles Teller) and Grimm (Jamie Bell) have perfected a way to not only teleport objects, but to bring them back, getting the notice of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) who gives Richards a full scholarship to the Baxter Institute.  

Storm's daughter Susan (Kate Mara) helps on the project with creating the environmental suits that will be needed when people are transported to the world that Reed has discovered, while Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) is brought in to help build a full-scale version of Richards's machine.  Also on the team is Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a rebellious programmer who objects to Franklin's working with the military to get funding for his project.  When the group, along with Ben, travel to the other dimension, things go wrong and they are all transformed, with the military pretty much detaining them to use their powers.  However, Victor, originally thought dead, turns out to pose a threat to the entire world. 

A major reason this movie tanked is because Josh Trank sent out a tweet prior to it opening talking about the movie he did make that got taken from him and heavily reshot, with Simon Kinberg adding in the new material.  Whatever sympathy there was for Trank quickly vanished when it came out how he treated Kate Mara, who was the studio's pick for Sue Storm, and how part of the reason Fox took the film away from him was because of his own strange behavior on set.  It's another example of an independent filmmaker suddenly having a multimillion-dollar blockbuster dumped on their lap and set up to fail by executives who ultimately have no faith in the person they hired.  We'll never get to see the version Trank made but, by his own account, he still didn't get to film most of what he wanted, so there is no use in releasing it.  In all honesty it is probably not much better than what we got.

What we did get was far from the worst movie ever made, and not even the worst superhero film.  At least this time around they decided to take it seriously, and the stretching on Richards finally doesn't look horrible.  Neither does a CGI Ben Grimm, but given that he is barely in the movie, despite being one of the bright points of the 2005 Fantastic Four, it doesn't matter too much.  In fact, everyone except Richards is pretty much pushed to the background, which is a baffling choice since there was a reason Stan Lee made them a team.  They never feel like a team at all in this movie, even when fighting Doom at the end. 

Despite this the first part of the movie, up to the point where they get their powers, works.  It's a different origin story than before and, at least with Richards, some time is taken to develop the character.  Where it falls apart is that bits and pieces were taken from the original script and stitched together without any real action scenes.  Even the one near the end is underwhelming.  It is a situation where suddenly the world is under a perilous threat and, five minutes later, it's not.  Until then the only stakes are whether Johnny will end up going into a combat zone.  

Josh Trank has said he will never do another comic book film again.  In reality, he has only done one other film, Capone, and the critical and audience response to that movie was no better than it was to Fantastic Four.  20th Century Fox, though they did everything they can to hold onto the franchise, wound up with one of its biggest failures and was most likely one of the reasons they had to sell out to Disney in the end.  Trank, on his part, lost out on the Boba Fett film, although after the fan backlash against Solo: A Star Wars Story that movie and many of the other Star Wars spinoffs were off the table anyway. 

It is impossible to tell if the movie Trank made would have been better, but it is doubtful.  It still seems like most of the action would have been missing and it still would not have built Sue, Johnny or Ben into solid characters instead of just support for Reed.  While a far cry from one of the worst movies ever made it was a franchise and a career killer.

Fantastic Four (2015)

Time: 100 minutes

Starring: Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey

Director: Josh Trank