re: Official Fantastic Four Review/RT 9%(SPOILERS!!!)-(by Fox)

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The entire experience is shameful — for us, for the filmmakers, for whoever at the studio had the job of creating the ads, in which the cast appear to be starring in hostage posters.

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The movie is all “why?” Why do these actors look drugged? Why is one big collection of set pieces staged in front of that boreal screensaver? Why is the other collection set in Ye Olde Science Lab? Why when Reed Richards stretches his arms and legs do they look like somebody overcooked the linguine? Why would anybody paying to see a 100-minute movie about superheroes want to spend more than an hour watching them become those superheroes when most of the same audience watched a version of the same story 10 years ago? (We just finished shrugging off another rebooting of Spider-Man!) Why hire Jamie Bell for three scenes, then turn him into a mound of steroidal debris? Why do the makers of our comic-book movies keep insisting upon the same government-soaked, anticapitalist plot?

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There’s a bar for the superhero adventures, and this one falls so far short of it that close study is warranted, hopefully by scientists played with more conviction that Teller and Mara. I’ve never seen good young actors this stuck. During one “climactic” scene, Mara has to bang away on a keyboard to make something crucial happen, and as I watched her slap away in a rendition of despair, I wondered how many takes it took to get that moment so wrong.

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Reg E. Cathey has a great smoker’s intonation that’s used to remind his black biological son, Johnny, that he’s never had it as easy as his adopted white daughter, Sue, even though he’s the brilliant bad-boy child of a well-compensated scientist who apparently has let him spend his nights combing the streets in a fast car looking for the casting director of the Fast & Furious series.

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Trank made Chronicle, a found-footage, non-comic-book superpowers movie that is generally regarded (by myself included) as innovative, at least as a movie about so-called origin stories. That was his first movie. It was largely independent, and, setting aside reports of his own errant behavior on the set for this second effort, it’s a giant studio contraption that appears to have crushed his imagination

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At every stage of Fantastic Four, you’re never watching this thing as a movie, per se, but as a dire, cautionary X-ray of one.

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