Movie Review: Fantastic Four

This review contains major plot details about the new Fantastic Four movie

I just subjected myself to Marvel's latest cinematic war crime, and brother, this thing makes the 2015 reboot look like The Empire Strikes Back.

Let me paint you a picture: imagine someone gave a first-year film student $200 million, a Wikipedia summary of the Fantastic Four, and explicit instructions to make the most aggressively mediocre movie possible. Now imagine that student spent 60% of the budget on a single chalkboard that appears in literally every other scene. That's what we're dealing with here.

The movie opens by ditching Marvel's iconic intro sequence, which should've been my first warning that I was watching some straight-to-streaming knockoff that somehow escaped containment. Instead of that pulse-pounding fanfare, we get... nothing. Just right into the suck.

Credit where it's due - they skip the origin story. Thank God. If I had to watch one more radioactive spider bite or cosmic ray exposure sequence, I was going to lose it. But that's where the positives end, folks.

The story kicks off with our "heroes" having already conquered Earth through the power of really aggressive diplomacy, apparently. Every nation has disbanded their armies and dismantled their nukes because Reed Richards asked real nice. The whole setup reeks of New World Order propaganda so thick you can taste it. Somewhere, Alex Jones is having an aneurysm.

Here's the kicker - the central conflict revolves around not having enough power to run the planet. Their solution? Force everyone to turn their lights off after 8 PM like we're living in some dystopian HOA nightmare. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there thinking, "Hey geniuses, you just made everyone dismantle their nuclear arsenals. Ever heard of nuclear power plants?" But no, that would require a screenplay written by someone with more than two functioning brain cells.

The absolute pinnacle of stupidity comes when they launch a rocket - full thrust, mind you - from DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN with a PREGNANT WOMAN aboard. I've seen middle school science fairs with a better grasp of physics. That baby would be strawberry jam before they cleared the first skyscraper.

The movie desperately tries to seem diverse by constantly cutting to a random Black woman watching TV. No name, no purpose, just... watching TV. It's tokenism so blatant it circles back around to being offensive.

Mole Man shows up for exactly two scenes and manages to be the most compelling character in the entire film. That's not a compliment to Mole Man - that's an indictment of everyone else.

The plot gets even dumber when they reveal they could've saved Earth by sacrificing their unborn child to Galactus, but Sue Storm gives this tear-jerker speech about growing up in a broken home that somehow makes everyone cool with planetary extinction. Their backup plan? Teleport THE ENTIRE EARTH somewhere else. Because that's a thing you can do now, apparently.

What follows is a montage of global forced blackouts that would make any authoritarian dictator weep with joy. Meanwhile, Johnny Storm learns an alien language in about five minutes so he can seduce Not-Silver-Surfer (she's a woman now, because of course she is) into betraying Galactus. His seduction technique? Repeating her life's purpose back to her until she gets scared and flies away. Casanova, this guy ain't.

Galactus himself shows up and literally - LITERALLY - goes "tra-la-la-ing" through New York like he's in a Disney musical. Each FF member gets their obligatory self-sacrifice scene that accomplishes exactly nothing until Sue Storm channels the "power of womanhood" (the movie's words, not mine) to shove a cosmic entity the size of a skyscraper across Manhattan and into a portal using her force fields.

The climax features Galactus getting knocked on his purple ass and trying to crawl back through the portal like a drunk frat boy until Not-Silver-Surfer sacrifices herself to keep him trapped in... somewhere. The movie doesn't bother explaining where. Or how. Or why any of this works.

This film is what happens when you let committee thinking and focus groups write your screenplay. It's two hours of expensive mediocrity punctuated by moments of staggering incompetence. The CGI looks like it was rendered on a PlayStation 3, the dialogue sounds like it was written by ChatGPT having a stroke, and the plot has more holes than Swiss cheese after a machine gun convention.

Save your money. Save your time. Hell, save your bandwidth if you were thinking of pirating it. This movie isn't just bad - it's an insult to anyone who's ever enjoyed a comic book, a movie, or basic storytelling. The only fantastic thing about it is how fantastically it fails at everything it attempts.

Rating: Half a star out of five, and that's only because Mole Man's two scenes reminded me that competent acting still exists somewhere in the universe. Just not here.