Fantastic Four

Director Josh Trank's take on the Fantastic Four is an epic, discombobulated cinematic mess. It's as if the people who wrote, directed and edited this thing never talked to each other about what they were doing with the material. It wastes the talents of Miles Teller (Reed Richards/The Stretchy Guy), Kate Mara (Sue Storm/Invisible Woman), Michael B. Jordan (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch) and Jamie Bell (Ben Grimm/The Thing) in an origin story with no sense of wonder or pulse. Trank made a recent public statement implying that the studio hijacked his film, and the movie we're seeing is not really his vision. Given how disjointed this film feels, I'd be inclined to believe him, although his Chronicle was nothing to get all that excited about. I'm not of the belief that, had Trank been left untethered for the entire production, the movie would've been any good. I do believe it might've been less heinously awful. Apart from the terrible acting, dung heap dialogue and plot problems, this movie possesses some of the worst special effects and makeup you will ever see in a modern big studio picture. For terrible makeup, look no further than Toby Kebbell's Victor Von Doom after he transforms on Planet Zero. He looks like a seventh-grader who tried to make a C-3PO costume out of melted silver Crayola crayons and then, while mushing the thing together, was introduced to low-grade meth.