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August 16, 2015

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Superhero flick a ‘Fantastic’ flop

I’LL admit it. About an hour into “Fantastic Four,” the inexplicably plodding and dreary new attempt to adapt the beloved Marvel story, I started thinking about Ethan Hunt from “Mission: Impossible.”

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, as I watched these fake young superheroes battle unconvincingly on a fake-looking planet for a reason nobody seemed to care much about anyway, to see Ethan swoop in — a real middle-aged guy hanging off a real plane by his bare knuckles, with a clear and immediate purpose and a real, throbbing pulse?

OK, enough wistfulness. “Fantastic Four,” directed by Josh Trank, deserves to be judged on its own merits. So here goes: It’s not wholesale terrible — just depressingly mediocre, and at a certain point you sort of start wishing it was definitively terrible, because that would at least make it more entertaining or give it a certain strange raison d’etre.

Aside from the known story — in a few words, science-loving humans experience a cosmic accident while exploring inter-dimensional travel and emerge with formidable superpowers — we have some talented actors on hand. They include the usually very compelling Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan, along with Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Reg E. Cathey and an expertly creepy Tim Blake Nelson.

It all begins promisingly, with a setup that introduces Reed Richards and Ben Grimm as fifth-graders on Long Island. Reed is a bespectacled science nerd; he tells his class his life goal is “to be the first person in human history to teleport myself.” The unimpressed teacher directs Reed to come back with a more realistic goal.

Years later, Reed (now Teller) is back with his invention at the high school science fair. Here, he and Ben meet Dr Franklin Storm (Cathey) and daughter Sue (Mara), who realize what Reed has — a better teleporter than their own. Storm gives Reed a scholarship at his science institute to pursue his dream.

Eventually, the full-blown teleporter is ready. One night, the youngsters get tipsy and decide to take a test spin.

Oops! They end up on Planet Zero and havoc ensues.

This isn’t the first attempt to make this story into a profitable franchise. Previous efforts failed. The thought here must have been to re-energize things with a young and appealing cast. But these actors are not well used, and their charisma remains untapped. The result? Something much less than fantastic.




 

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