WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED THIS REBOOT COULD BE WORSE?

By T.T. Stern-Enzi

Rating: PG-13, Grade: D-

Following the less than stellar box office results of Tim Story’s two previous attempts to bring Marvel’s first family to the big screen, “Chronicle” director Josh Trank takes over, with the assignment of injecting his dark and gritty sensibilities into the mix. Right off the bat, Trank and the screenwriting team of Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater upended the historic characterizations by casting Michael B. Jordan (one of his super-powered “Chronicle” players) as the fiery Johnny Storm, the brother of Kate Mara’s Sue Storm, with Miles Teller and Jamie Bell stepping in, respectively as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm.

The truly surprising aspect here has less to do with the re-configuring of the racial/family dynamic—with Reg E. Cathey (from the HBO series “The Wire”) as their scientist father Franklin—than the decision to break from the traditional origin, focusing instead on the alternative Marvel “Ultimates” storyline when the team is far younger than normal. In addition, this iteration of the “Fantastic” quartet ends up traveling to another dimension rather than into space. The impact, especially in the first half, amounts to an enticing immersion into a world willing to embrace its speculative science fiction roots. We get that Reed wanders around inside his head a bit too much and that Sue, as a woman of science, is figuratively and literally invisible before the accident triggers her transformation.

Problems arise, though, when the studio powers that be apparently asserted themselves and mandated that “Fantastic Four” needed to get back to the traditional origin story blueprint. Give the audience montages where the heroes display their abilities (CGI opportunities), have them engage in trumped up inter-personal drama and make sure they face off against their main recognizable villain—former team member Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell)—in a no-holds-barred finale.

During the second half, I started to mentally check out. We’ve seen this all before. Tim Story’s version was decidedly too lightweight in its execution, but there were genuine moments of playful whimsy. For a filmmaker who perfectly captured the sense of wonderment of new abilities in “Chronicle,” Trank comes across as a dour spoilsport. Maybe he’s simply buried beneath the studio playbook.

I wisely used the time to figure out what I wanted, which this film completely lacked, and that was a willingness to boldly venture somewhere, anywhere else along the decades long timeline of Marvel’s First Family. The apt comparison, for me, is Ben Affleck’s first feature “Gone Baby Gone,” which was based on one of crime fiction writer Dennis Lehane’s novels about the private investigating team of Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan). “Gone Baby Gone” is actually the fourth story in the Kenzie/Gennaro series, but Affleck drops us into their lives, mid-stream, and leaves the door open for prequels and/or sequels because there is no need for an “origin” story. For comic book adaptations going forward, it would be wise for filmmakers and studios to consider this notion or the genre will die from self-inflicted wounds.

How many times do we need to see Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider? How many ways can Bruce Wayne endure the loss of his parents in that alley? The power, the responsibility—blah, blah, blah. Enough already. And what about the rogues’ gallery of antagonists for Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and, here, the Fantastic Four? Dr. Doom is, without a doubt, a pivotal villainous figure in the annals of the Marvel comic book universe, but he’s by no means the only interesting opponent the Fantastic Four has faced since the 1960s. Why not explore other phases of that rich and inventive timeline?

The real failure of this reboot is not merely that it wasn’t “fantastic”; the movie is just one more example of how the industry as a whole has yet to embrace its potential to give us something truly marvelous.