Well, shit. Turns out that all the worries about Fantastic Four being a big debacle were warranted. The movie is a mess. It’s not that it doesn’t have interesting heroes or good actors to play them; it's just that at every turn it's one cliched platitude after another and essentially devolves into what The Hollywood Reporter rightly called a "100-minute trailer for a movie that never happens."
Despite some well, they tried chemistry between its four main leads—Miles Teller (Reed Richards), Kate Mara (Sue Storm), Michael B. Jordan (Johnny Storm), and Jamie Bell (Ben Grimm)—you’d be forgiven for not knowing the climax was happening until it's halfway over. People say things like "We can’t change the past, we can change the future." It's ridiculous. Trainwreck had more heroic feats than this.
That said, we don’t want to just pile on. (At least not too much.) So we’ll keep this simple. Since everyone seems to be talking about how awful 95% of the movie is, or like it's the worst pee-wee football game ever, we decided to just run the movie's stats. Here's a numerical breakdown of every random, stupid, or just plain unnecessary thing that happens in Fantastic Four.
Number of Instagram References: 1
Number of Portishead References: 1
Number Assigned to the Planet That Is Basically the Stand-In for the Negative Zone From the Comics: 0 (Seriously, it’s called “Planet Zero.”)
Number Assigned to the Area That Is Basically the Stand-In for Area 51: 57 (Again, we’re not kidding. It’s called Area 57 and its location is “classified.”)
Number of Times the Dudes Call Sue Storm When They Decide to Go Off in Reed’s Teleporter Half Cocked: 0
Number of Times Sue Storm Is in An Unconscionably Bad Wig: 5 (at least)
Number of Times Tim Blake Nelson’s Dr. Allen Smacks Gum to Show Off His Bad Guy Qualities: 6(ish)
Number of Times Reed Richards Yells Some Exposition About What Dr. Doom Is Doing: 3
Number of Times You’ll See Michael B. Jordan and Wish You Were Watching Friday Night Lights: 14
Number of Times You’ll Question Why The Human Torch Still Has Body Hair: 7
Number of Times a Child Calls Reed Richards a “Dick”: 1 (granted, it was an accurate assessment.)
Number of Terrible Lines Like “There Is No Victor, Only Doom”: 19 or so
Number of Minutes of Life Lost on This Movie: 87 (It’s 100 minutes; 13 of them are good.)
