Review: Fantastic 4 (2015)

by Trent Crump
★★

 Okay, I think we've all seen the completely miserable other reviews for this movie by now.  It's currently got an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the critic aggregate.  (A 6% if you just include top critics.)  So it's completely terrible, right?  Pretty much everyone agrees.  Well, yes, it's a ridiculously made film.  It breaks the three act structure, it's actionless until the last 20 minutes, it's drab and arguably dull.  However, I do have a problem with people going by the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate on this.  Basically the site gives the movie an up or down vote based on each individual review.  However, not all bad reviews mean the movie is completely without merit.  And that seems to be the case here.  Sure, the film is a mess, but does it really deserve a score lower than the 2004 Catwoman film (9%)?  1997's incredibly maligned Batman & Robin (11%)?   1986's Howard the Duck (14%)?  In my opinion, no.

    This movie has been marked for at least half a year.  Reports had come in of massive reshoots, the director showing up drunk on set (or not at all some days), the studio getting cold feet and backing out of the agreed story after the director had been hired...  It was a mess.  The comic book purists didn't make things any easier by going after Michael B. Jordon, who plays Johnny Storm (The Human Torch) in the film because he and Sue Storm (Invisible Girl) played by Kate Mara, are supposed to be close brother and sister.  Kate Mara, is of course, white.  Now, the father is black, so I don't know why they didn't have a problem with Kate Mara instead (whose character was adopted as a child).   They insist it isn't a racial thing, so maybe it's just because the family was white in the comics and it's a (non-racial) purity thing.  I don't know.  I do think that over the past five years or so, it's become fashionable for people to pile on a movie based on studio/set turmoil and declare it a bad movie.  They did it for John Carter back in 2012 as well.  Was it horrible?  No.  Was it great?  No.  It was pretty mediocre.  They did it to The Lone Ranger, Green Lantern, and X-Men Origins as well.  Ok, those may have been pretty bad, but I still don't see the point of the practice.  It's a mob mentality that makes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  The people in love with the source material get restless and form a mob.  The studio gets scared.  They take it out on the director.  The director is over-ruled by the studio.  The studio basically takes over the picture, and we get something even worse.  

   That's exactly what happened here.  Now, obviously the director Josh Trank had issues.  He wasn't dependable.  His behavior here is why he has been pulled off the Star Wars movie he was set to direct.  The studio changed the script they had agreed to shoot, apparently, and this had made Trank despondent.  No excuse, but there it is.  They took out most of the action and we have this mess now.

    The story is pretty straightforward.  Reed Richards starts working on a transporter as a kid.  Ben Grimm, whose family owns the town junk yard eventually helps him with it after he doesn't turn Reed in for trying to steal a power converter.  Fast forward seven years and at the school science fair, the two are disqualified after their teacher sees no science in their experiment (which had worked).  However, Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter Sue are there at the time and hire on Reed at the Baxter Foundation to complete his work.  See, what Reed had been working on had already been started on by the foundation under the guidance of Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell).  (Yeah, that name'll get you hired...)  Doom had left the project, thinking the world didn't deserve it, being the misanthrope he is.  However, Dr. Storm gets him to come back and help Reed.  Also joining the science team is Dr. Storm's biological son, Johnny, who has daddy issues and just wants to be a daredevil, but his daddy took his car away.  Long story short, they build the transporter and things go downhill for our characters from there.

    The big issue with the movie is that it's all build up.  They spend literally 3/4 of the film without a villain.  Without a fight.  Basically cooped up in a big laboratory.  It's not a fun movie.  There is one big fight in the film.  It lasts maybe 10 minutes, and it (and the movie) is over.  The first act?  Pretty interesting.  You have some character development.  You get to actually like Reed (which is better than the comics do, in my opinion).  You can see how fragile his friend Ben (who becomes the rock-monster The Thing) really is.  He's got a lot of anger boiling up inside.  I don't think I ever saw the character smile in this film. Even before he became The Thing.  Sue is shown to be sort of stand-offish.  She takes a while to warm up to Reed.  She and her brother clearly care for each other a lot but have a strained relationship due to Johnny's issues with his father.  The first half of the film is dedicated to the transporter being built and is all used for character development.  It's pretty great, if a bit boring at times.  The second half is where it all falls apart.  It's when they decided to make it a superhero movie, surprisingly enough.  When the characters get their powers, it's pretty depressing.  They are in pain, locked in cells, not told what's happened to them, and experimented on by the military.  Josh Trank, the director, wanted the powers not to be seen as a blessing at first, but as "disabilities".  And I liked that idea.  However, X-Men explored that better.  Here it just took up another fourth of a film that was running out of time to actually do something.  Well, something happens at the end of act 3.  The birth of Dr. Doom.  (This isn't a spoiler.  Dr. Doom was shown in the trailer.)  Now, Dr. Doom here is without mercy.  He kills people by making their heads explode as he walks by.  It's pretty cool, actually.  The problem is that he starts doing this 20 minutes before the end of the film.  It's like the third act is from a different movie.  How did this dark superhero movie get into my dark character study?  And it's not a good one.  Dr. Doom's plot is cliched to anyone who has seen Moonraker or Watchmen.  And it's not explained well either.  It just sort of happens and our heroes have to fight together.  At least with the Avengers it takes 1 1/2 hours for them to actually tolerate each other to agree to team up.  Here they dislike each other and all of a sudden are using teamwork pretty flawlessly.  

    In the end, it's not the worst movie in the world.  It's not even the worst of the year or the summer.  It is a fascinating train wreck that I hope we get a documentary of one day.  The behind-the-scenes drama sounds fascinating.  I doubt we get the sequel that had been greenlit for 2017.  They'll probably just reboot again.  I personally thought this was more interesting than the 2005 Fantastic Four film, which I hated.  Or maybe this is just one comic that doesn't translate well to screen.  I didn't hate this movie.  Heck, I even sort of liked the chances it took.  The special effects are, indeed, fantastic.  I have no love for the source material, so I wasn't wedded to it as many are.  However, just because one personally likes a film doesn't mean it's good.  This movie is not good.  It's not trash either.  There are way worse movies than this.  If anything it's mediocre.  Don't believe the teeth-gnashers.

Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★★½

Oh sure, you don’t like Tom Cruise. At least not since he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch proclaiming his love for his now ex-wife. I’ve heard that sentiment all too often from a vast number of people. People loved 1980s Tom Cruise. They loved him in “Jerry Maguire.” And “Minority Report” was pretty awesome too, right? But being a couch-jumping Scientologist is too much for some folks I guess. You know that happened, like, ten years ago, right? And over the last several years, Cruise’s movies have been pretty great. Didn’t see “Edge of Tomorrow?” Please, you need to see that movie. And “Oblivion” was great too.

Then there’s his “Mission: Impossible” franchise. The third and fourth installments came out post-Oprah incident, which I found to be very enjoyable, especially the fourth film “Ghost Protocol.” The franchise generates enough money to keep warranting sequels, but as long as they’re good who cares? “Mission: Impossible – Rouge Nation” is the latest installment and might be the most adrenaline pumping adventure Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has embarked upon yet.

A terrorist organization known only as The Syndicate has identified Ethan Hunt after he rips off their attempt to smuggle some radioactive weaponry. He’s kidnapped, but subsequently broken out by Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who may or may not be an undercover British operative. Meanwhile back home, the CIA lead by Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) has disbanded the IMF and is on the lookout for Hunt. Therefore, Hunt, Faust, Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Luther (Ving Rhames) must all work out of sight of the CIA in order to bring this Syndicate down.

As far as “Mission: Impossible” plots go, “Rouge Nation” is pretty straightforward and easy to follow. You’re not sitting there scratching your head trying to figure out what the heck just happened. You’re here to see high-octane action pieces tied together with a cohesive narrative, and that’s exactly what you get. There’s just enough plot to move everything along from one big action sequence to the next without ever becoming so bogged down by mind numbing plot details. This has become an ever-prevalent problem plaguing so many movies. The story is important, yes, but it doesn’t have to be smothered with so much plot that it becomes a boring mess.

“Rogue Nation” is far from this. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Usual Suspects”) understands that pace is incredibly important in movie such a this and does his duty as a storyteller by showing us all the pertinent information on screen. He does it like this rather than sitting two or more characters at a table and having them over-explain everything little detail. It’s a relief to see something like this in a summer action blockbuster.

McQuarrie’s his already a proven writer, and now continues to improve of his craft as a director. A lot of talk has already been made about Cruise’s airplane stunt (where he actually hung off the side of a military airplane while it took off) but that’s the first stunt we see in the film. From there, it only gets better. Each of these “Mission: Impossible” films has a signature stunt, but there are several different pieces in here that are spectacular.

I won’t go into any details about them, because that would just spoil the surprise, but one of them does involve a high-speed chase. It’s probably one of the best chase scenes we’ve seen (other than the entirety of “Mad Max: Fury Road”) in several years. Most of that can be attributed the stunt driving and the utilization of practical effects rather than CGI. The camera work and editing are pretty sensational too. It’s cut in rapid form, but it’s not overkill. The sequences still make sense. You can clearly differentiate everything that’s happening. These types of scenes don’t happen by accident; they’re carefully crafted from pre-production all the way through the end. When filmmakers, such as McQuarrie, use their heads about what they want everything to look like, that’s when these types of scenes end up being memorable.

Ultimately, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” is very memorable. From the action scenes to the stellar performances by the entire cast, this film is absolutely one of the most enjoyable movies of the summer. Those who haven’t seen any of the previous films will still be able to enjoy this since these films all seem to stand very well on their own. In an era of film where we’re treated to far too many franchise, Cruise seems to know exactly what he needs to do to position “Mission: Impossible” in a class all of its own.

One more thing: the worst thing action movies can do is open up with a bore. “The Avengers” suffered this issue, opening with walking and talking down hallways about all sorts of exposition. “Age of Ultron” wasn’t much better. It did open with a big action scene, but it was almost entirely CGI and not in a very unique setting. “Rogue Nation” opens with its star hanging off the side of an airplane with no use of green screens and computers. Let’s see Downey, Jr. do that. Love him or hate him, Tom Cruise and this franchise are setting the bar high for everyone else.