Review of Numerical FU - Fant4Stic

I have waited a long time to slam this movie. I have let the hate fester in my heart, crawl over my skin, anger at the fact that this is another amazing idea dragged into the dust. And now, I can review it. It’s like a dream come true, only it’s one of those sadistic dreams you’re not supposed to take pleasure in.

This movie, which I’m going to call Fant4stic throughout the review even though it’s called Fantastic Four, is garbage. Pure garbage. I don’t know what exactly happened behind the scenes, I don’t know why this movie fails so hard on every level, I don’t know why this was the result of hundreds of people going “Yep! This’ll be a box-office hit” and passing along the script to be refined until it reached its final destination. But I do know one thing; this movie suuuucks. And it lost $80-100 million for 20th Century Fox, which is satisfying revenge at least.

Reiterating from my X-Men: Apocalypse review, I don’t read the comics. I just review them as films instead of violations of my Cheeto-stained bible (That’s probably a racist statement to comic readers, so sorry).

So Fant4stic begins randomly in the childhood of character Reed Richards, where we learn he wants to make a teleporter. We then go forward ten minutes, failing to build suspense or any likeability, until we get to the point where he and Ben Grimm are teenagers and are telling the exact same story of the first ten minutes. So, ten minutes in, you’ve demonstrated how unnecessary those minutes were. Not a good start.

But it gets way worse. In the next 90-ish minutes, Fant4stic goes off the rails with ridiculous character decisions, cheap special effects, an awful villain, boring production design and so many moments where I just think, “This is a movie. Made by people, who live on Earth. Why is this so bad?”

Me when I think of this movie in relation to coherence, quality, storytelling, SFX, logic...

Alright, let’s start with those character decisions. They make about as much sense as the ones in Prometheus, or the decision to allow helicopters to fly next to explosives on the set of The Twilight Zone (that did happen, it was very tragic). They’re so bad that they are laughable.

Those special effects. I read that they were done by some random Canadian company called OTOY that I’ve never heard of prior to looking it up. They offshored their workforce to make the movie cheaper and rushed the VFX team to breaking point, so multiple scenes have really bad green screen, rubbery humanoids and some effects which look like they were literally copied and pasted from much better films.

That villain. He’s introduced 20 minutes FROM THE END of the film. He looks like a guy wrapped himself in shiny duct tape and put reflective green contact lenses on with his bedsheet as a cape. He demonstrates insane powers, fails to use them against the heroes, and just dies for no real reason. Steppenwolf was more intimidating in Justice League, and he looked like a kindergartner tried drawing Deag Ranak from Doom: Eternal.

This is just embarrassing.

That production design. So much of the movie is shot in what looks like some warehouse where some people left some whiteboards and computers and jars of science. The other dimension they visit lacks any sort of otherworldliness and looks like if someone Photoshopped some mountains black. They didn’t even hire enough extras for the school scene, for goodness sake.

Wouldn't there be students standing in front of these projects?

And the actual Fantastic Four? They consist of a guy with no charisma whatsoever (despite demonstrating incredible talent in Whiplash), a woman with a cheap blonde wig and no character beyond “smart”, an extraordinarily talented actor who’s reduced to an angsty drag racer, and a sentient pile of rocks voiced by a BAFTA-winning actor.

Models of their generation.

Never see this god/Allah/Jewish god/Tom Cruise forsaken mess of a movie. Never. Unless you are morbidly curious to see what the guys behind The Umbrella Academy and that insane Tom Hardy Capone movie did before they hit big.

What numbered movies have you seen, and were they a route to happiness or just a 0<x<1 square? Leave your answers in the comments below.