Fantastic Four
0 Waffles!

You have to employ the buddy system if you go to see Fantastic Four, so each of you can wake up the other at various points throughout the movie.

Miles Teller stars as Reed Richards – the geekiest geek in the history of the world (you can tell because he is wearing glasses). Along with his unlikely pal, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), he develops a way to transfer matter from place to place using teleportation, but little does Reed realize he has found a portal into another dimension. This world could be the savior of ours, so a mysterious group of scientists and military dudes recruit the young genius to help them build his machine on a larger scale.

Instead of letting some astronauts or others properly trained to make such a trek be the ones to experiment with it, the team who built this contraption - Reed, Ben, Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and the subtly named Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) - drunkenly decide to be the first to travel to the other dimension.

It’s a disaster.

Reed, Johnny and Ben return, but find themselves permanently altered with strange new abilities. Victor Von Doom is left for dead on the other side, and Sue Storm (Kate Mara), who was part of the team, but not part of the drunken trek, also gets contaminated by the team’s re-entry into the lab.

What will become of these four pals when Reed disappears and the rest make a deal to help the military while a cure is sought?

To be fair, let’s start with what they got right. The word “Fantastic” is spelled correctly in the title.

Now, let’s talk about the rest of this failure.

Maybe writer/director Josh Trank wants to kill off the Fantastic Four once and for all because none of these movies have been any good, including this wreck of an attempt. Trank makes this Fantastic Four a plodding, pointless, boring flop lacking any compelling emotion, action or characters.

Fellow co-writers Jeremy Slater and Simon Kinberg team up with Trank to stick us with a lengthy opening hour tediously trying to establish where each character comes from and an explanation of their relationship with each other, but the lack of details renders each one a vacuous, unlikable stereotype instead of providing the basis for a bond among them.

The dialogue doesn’t help as it lacks wit and purpose.

Lame exchanges between Sue and Reed as they flirt with each other make you wonder why either one would ever find the other attractive.

Attempts at humor also fall flat because of the monotone delivery of each actor (probably at the prompting of Trank, since it is uniform among all, or these kids were as bored as they look).

The special effects look super cheap as the set for the other dimension appears to have been constructed in a 1940s Hollywood studio. Maybe they used props from some old movie to save money!

Plus, the costume worn by our late arriving villain appears to be snatched off the racks of a discount Halloween store. Did they just put glitter on an old Darth Vader mask?

Worst of all, Trank doesn’t show strong storytelling skills as we are stuck with a great deal of meaningless, misdirected establishment, but no raising of the tension level to deliver a thrilling climax. This movie doesn’t build to anything. It just lays there like a fish on the sand.

Why did we hope and pray Fantastic Four would be good? Didn’t experience teach us that isn’t possible?

Fantastic Four is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language.