Fantastic Four (2015)

#StokerScore 3/10

I can only imagine that someone at 20th CENTURY FOX, you know who I mean, it says it right there on the poster, the studio who brought us X-Men: Days of Future Past, I can only imagine that their executive said in a meeting "...but just imagine the marketing opportunities if we can get this right!! We could have the rock guy built back in pieces,  and maybe the Human Torch could actually be a torch, and the stretch guy would finally replace Stretch Armstrong and, and, well we're still struggling for how we can make a toy out of the Invisible Girl, but hey, three out of four ain't bad, is it?" I genuinely believe this cash-in was more about the marketing opportunities than it ever was about making a movie. 

For example, Fox are the same film studio who were responsible for this...

and this...

and, lest we forget, this...

Yes I know this is the studio who made Castaway and even True Lies, but my point is that where the current craving for superhero movies meant that even Sony realised they were onto a good thing when Disney agreed to partner them on the next Spider-man movie, so bad was the response to the direction in which they were trying to take that character, for Fox to march blindly forward, desperately hoping to unite the FF's to the X's at some unknown point in the future is just sad to see.

In fact if you look at just how much Fox have been messing about with the X-Men, trying to get that right, and that they thought that people might believe this new Fantastic Four movie more if they reminded people about it on the poster, it reeks of desperation. I mean forget the fact that you've got Josh Trank as director, who created a superhero movie out of a shoestring when he made Chronicle, or the kid from Whiplash starring in the damn thing. To quote Lock Stock's Winston the horticulturalist. "Alarm bells are ringing, Willie"

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Having only recently seen Ant Man, another example of the incredible things the people at Marvel/Disney can do, I really hoped that this movie was going to be more than the horror stories that were coming from behind the scenes. 

I'm glad I saw this on the big screen rather than wait for the dvd and there are things to like in this movie, there just aren't enough of them to outweigh the things that there are to dislike. And the biggest problem of all? It just wasn't Fantastic.