I don't see a Reviews thread anywhere yet, so I hope you don't mind me posting here. I went to an advance screening in the UK tonight, and here is my Non-Spoiler review:
With all the negativity surrounding the production from the earliest stages, I went into FANTASTIC FOUR hoping for a triumph over the odds. And in a perverse way, I guess it is, but not in the manner I'd hoped. See, with all the intense negativity surrounding this production from even the early stages, if there was one thing I didn't imagine would be possible, it was that FANTASTIC FOUR could possibly disappoint me. And yet, somehow, it did.
I'll try to explain. The most disarming thing about this is that, for the first 40 minutes or so, this is a freaking GREAT movie. Like, me open-mouthed stunned, sitting in the cinema thinking, "Oh my God, they pulled it off. This ultimate underdog has managed to silence the haters." Yes, the characters are mostly a bit younger than they should be. But scrape past that, and in that opening sequence, this is a film that just *gets* the Fantastic Four and what makes their characters and the relationship, on a deeper level than the previous films managed. The actors are all top-notch, and inhabit their roles so well, bringing the humanity to each of the key figures and cementing who they are before the powers hit them. Miles Teller is just great in the film, and for the first time on the screen they managed to nail that Reed Richards is the most fascinating character of all the four, and that it's not his stretchy powers that make him special, it's his incredible mind. And science, and the power of intelligence and future-thinking, is presented as being right at the forefront here in a way that's kinda inspiring. It felt like superhero storytelling laced with an INTERSTELLAR-style awe with the might of human potential.
Even this much-dreaded interpretation of Doom is handled so well at first. There's no computer hacker/blogger Victor Domashev: he's Victor Von Doom, from Latveria. And Toby Kebbell is leagues ahead of Julian McMahon's smarmy yuppie, and totally nails the character's motivations. He's all fragile ego and simmering jealousy towards Reed, his contempt for Richards' supposed lesser intelligence hiding an insecurity that Richards may be smarter than him. And yet still he finds himself starting to admire Reed and become friends with him in spite of himself, it's all handled so well. Sue's complicated protective relationship with Johnny, Ben feeling out of his depth amongst these intellectual heavyweights but having Reed's back no matter what, it's all touched on here. Even the origin itself is handled well, a skillful display of steadily escalating tension, with the heroes' transformations handled in a quite jarringly horrific "body horror" fashion that gave things a fresh new angle and totally made sense. And in terms of character focused origin-telling that makes these characters feel fleshed out and relevant, I genuinely thought Fox were on course to giving us a BATMAN BEGINS for the Fantastic Four, that's how good it was.
And then it falls apart.
I'll try not to get too much into spoilers, but I'll say there's a clear dividing line between what was a great film and what just turns into a mess: it's a black screen, with a caption reading, "ONE YEAR LATER." And everything after that, it's like a different director working from a different script. Suddenly, all that carefully built up momentum is gone. And you realise that all the stuff that was so beautifully set up in the first half of the film never gets adequately paid off. Toby Kebbell's great work is largely undone and Doom turns into a damp squib. And perhaps more unforgivably, the Fantastic Four themselves lose all their chemistry. Suddenly it's like there's no chemistry between them, to the point where they might as well have filmed their scenes separately and been green-screened together. We don't actually get to experience them becoming a team, just get told they are. The Thing in particular gets a bum deal here. Jamie Bell is actually really strong as Ben Grimm, selling his pained humanity and making his friendship with Reed the heart of the film. But he is never given a chance to really connect with anyone else in the cast or feel integral to their unit. Seriously, I think I could count the amount of dialogue exchanges between Ben/Johnny and Ben/Sue COMBINED in one hand, and have fingers left over.
Really, the back half of the film just feels so rushed, and therefore inconsequential, to the point where by the end of the film I didn't even think it was the end. As the film entered its final minutes, I was thinking maybe we'd seen a lackluster mid-film set-piece, and hoping that the film would be able to claw back its momentum for the finale after a sluggish middle. Then it just ends, and I'm like, "HUH?" I genuinely think so many people stayed waiting for an after-credits sequence (there isn't one) because of this shared feeling of, "That CAN'T be it." This is a very slender hour-and-a-half film.
Short version: FANTASTIC FOUR has a superb first act, an underwhelming second act, and no third act. Not a good structure to have at all.
So, that brings us back to the beginning, and disappointment. In a way, I'd have preferred for this to just be a steaming turd of a film. Then I could have just disengaged and laughed at how awful it was. Instead, there's so much good stuff here, and they come tantalisingly close to making a quality film. And the fact that they then spectacularly fumble the ball at the goal line makes the whole viewing experience that much more infuriating. The fact they did enough right to see the great movie they set the groundwork for but ended up not making. In the end, FANTASTIC FOUR is not a turkey, and given the hate this film has endured, that in itself is a sort of triumph. But ultimately, I'd classify FANTASTIC FOUR as a frustrating near-miss.
