Movie Review: "Fantastic Four" (2025)

(Note: it's an opinion, not a fact. If you enjoyed this film then that's fine by me. It's really not my thing though).

Fantastic Four is a movie that has never done too well at the box office and if you're as old as I am then you probably remember the one from 2005 and hated it. You probably also remember the one from 2015 and hated that too and ultimately, the one in 2025 probably proves to us that this comic book is not very well-suited to the screen. Be that as it may, they keep making it over and over again, launching them into the new Marvel Cinematic Universe and preparing us for Doomsday. I'm not going to lie, this has to be one of the worst things I've ever wasted my time watching.

Let's start with the fact that this movie is very, very boring. There's nothing about the storyline that they've done differently, nothing that is even remotely interesting. It just feels like the movie is being churned out without very much attention to the way it would move the audience. Now, I know it's a Marvel movie and so, we shouldn't expect much anyway but we have to remember how the run up to Endgame made us all feel. Those were well-made in-depth movies which often explored some deep themes regarding humanity even though many people wanted to dismiss them as basically McMovies. Perhaps on the surface they were. But this feels more like a McMovie than anything else. It is just so empty and devoid of any emotion and even the acting is stiff and detached.

Now, I love Vanessa Kirby as much as the next person - she is a wonderful action star and scenes where she's kicking someone's butt are great. Her portrayal of Princess Margaret in The Crown was so good, I genuinely could not imagine anyone else in her position. But in The Fantastic Four it feels like she's got all the emotion of a ketchup bottle. She makes a speech to a bunch of people about doing things 'as a family' and it just felt all so forced and kind of ridiculous. It probably is not her fault, the writing felt like someone had employed a 12-year-old to script the film.

Moving on to the try-hard acting of Joseph Quinn who I feel sorry for as he too, was trying to do the best he could with a script so bad it should've been binned the first time someone had to read it. The speech he makes to the Silver Surfer woman about the planets being wiped out and finding out about who she was before is very shouty and not well-acted but again, it is also badly written. The story is a little all over the place and the main question I have is that why is this all-powerful being even giving them an option. I'm quite concerned about the fact that this film will establish these ideas and then just fling them off a cliff as if they never did in about five years' or so. There's probably going to be some serious backtracking in a few years hopefully to wipe out all the rubbish this film started.

There are also too many 'sudden realisations' and random epiphanies in this movie. "Oh my god, we need to do X!" happens at least five times in the film with no explanation. The one and a half hour run time is obviously there because of the younger generations having not much of an attention span left (thank you random short-form video applications you absolute nightmares). But gosh is this movie bringing out all the annoyances and plot holes...

Let's just put it this way, after watching Thunderbolts, I didn't hold out much hope for the future of Marvel. This movie probably buried it in the ground. I pray that Robert Downey Jr can save us, because if he can't, we might be staring down the barrel of the end of a gigantic era - something never seen before in cinema. It makes me rather sad that we might have to mourn the loss of Marvel in my lifetime but here we are. All I know is that this era of Marvel is absolutely terrible and it's going to take a lot to bring it back up to speed.