3 out of 5

Directed by: Josh Trank

Lots of hate for this movie.  Lots of hate for the previous two as well, which I didn’t think were that bad – and quite enjoyed the first one, actually, despite its awful use of Dr. Doom and freaking Jessica Alba.  So what is it?  What is it about this property that automatically seems to make people sneer?  …I’d guess different things at different times.  We were still riding pretty high off of Spider-Man at the time – finally, comic book movies done with some legitimacy, we thought – but then we were still stumbling, what with The Hulk way too melodramatic and then the Daredevil properties sinking us back into cheap thrills that we’d blush to be viewing, slinking into the back comic aisles to mutter defenses of the source material.  So here comes FF, and it seems to be all puns and Alba, and modernized, and what the hell with Doom, and it just couldn’t win.  Strip it of expectations, though, and I maintain that it’s pretty entertaining, with good casting of everyone except Sue, and… well, a dumb plot, true, only saved by the character chemistry.  FF2 gave us a Galactus cloud.  Not a bad idea, actually, if you consider how to actualize G-man on screen without it looking atrocious, but that was an automatic fanboy foul, and besides, this was a sequel to an already spat upon movie by genre fans, so it was flagged as a money maker and nothing more.

The world is much different in regard to comic book films now, as we have the MCU.  Which is maybe at a tipping point, but still surprising us with Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man, two off-brand properties that have been entertaining and managed to feel original – not just rolled off an assembly line.  And then there’s FOX, holding on to the X-Men, Spider-Man (for now) and FF properties, and thus being branded the devil because wouldn’t Marvel Studios handle those films so much better?  Add to this that director Trank was a fresh-face off of an indie hit, Chronicle, and you’re guaranteed haters of anything “cool” added to the haters who were already skeptical because of the studio.  It’s a tough spot to be in.  And the first set of reactions to the film seems like it hasn’t been able to align the necessary details to break free of that spot.

Which is unfortunate, because FF 2015 is really not a bad movie.  In fact, about two-thirds of it is pretty good, with hints of what could’ve been great if – as has been rumored, at least – it hadn’t been meddled with.  Now who knows who did the meddling, but something happened, something which causes the film to accelerate its pacing ridiculously in the last fifteen minutes to get to a giant battle that gets exposited and battled and concluded within a few breaths and pretty much sorta makes you uncomfortably want to defend everything else that suddenly seems really good in comparison.  In other words, the battle scene does seem like a studio addition, or compression, as FF, at 100 minutes, is shorter than the 2+ hour action flicks we’ve been getting as of late, especially ones with more serious tones like FF adapts in its earlier portion.

You probably know the drill by now: Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is super smart and gets recruited by Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) to join think-tank The Baxter Institute – along with his adopted daughter, Sue (Kate Mara) and bad boy Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) – to crack inter-dimensional travel, with Storm’s idealistic end-game to find a new source of energy to revive our over-taxed planet.  Richards’ childhood friend Ben (Jamie Bell) and Storm’s son, Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) get wrapped up in things, and soon enough an ill-advised trip across dimensions ends badly, all five recruits winding up with mutations – horrible, fascinating, all in the eyes of the beholder.  This element is something the film actually sells very well.  While throughout there are snippets of character moments that feel left out, Trank (and the various writers who touched the script) effect a proper feeling of both anticipation and dread during the build-up, with the uniformly excellent cast truly believable in their various roles and involvement, and identifiable as unique characters.  The 2005 film struggled with shoe-horning Doom into things, but it makes sense here, and it’s nice to see the interesting balance of chemistry that builds behind he and Sue and Reed.  It’s also nice that they don’t even try to explain his last name, just letting it be.  (Although early leaked details suggested otherwise, so… who knows.)  And when things go wrong, they feel wrong… in the right way.  It feels like a tragedy.  These don’t feel like superpowers.  The pacing starts to speed up here, but the film wisely flash-forwards after the accident so we can skip over the grieving to the aftermath.  Because of the tone that’s been set in how we’re introduced to their powers, this device works as a shorthand without sacrificing too much of an emotional component.

Alas, this is where it starts to get a bit wonky.  While the reason the team teams up is sound – and the threat, congratulations, feels truly threatening (the cause of the threat anyway, not the hasty big explosion stuff that starts to happen) – it’s 100% lacking the patience displayed elsewhere in the film.  The color palette and mood is still kept cold and somber, thankfully, but then that gets dashed away by a shiny happy ending that sort of forgets to mention the shit-show everyone went through.  But I just can’t fault the film as resolutely as the Ebert review for this because of all the promise that I think was achieved before whatever happened in the final portion of the flick.  The short runtime makes this even easier to swallow: when it goes downhill, it’s suddenly over pretty quickly.

But then again, I didn’t mind the other films either, so maybe I’m just easier to please.

…And before I go, some words about The Thing.  The Thing, like The Hulk, will be impossible to render effectively on screen until some type of visual effects advancement realizes how to achieve the balance for larger-than-life characters who have to interact with real actors.  The suit was okay in the other flicks, but it never carried any heft.  A lot of the full-body movement shots of Ben feel off in the way CG actors tend to, but I really like the way Jamie handled the vocal duties (and how the voice was treated after his transformation) and I do think they got the eyes right.  So this Thing had a soul, and the benefit of CG over suit is that he did get to seem a bit more menacing.  Yeah yeah, no pants, no eyebrows, but he could punch hard and the soulfulness was the one thing to nail if they nailed anything.  So I was okay with it.

(Yup, easy to please.)