REVIEW - FANTASTIC FOUR (JOSH TRANK)

And there's that. Who cares who's responsible? 20th Century Fox has no doubt mauled Josh Trank's Fantastic Four, diminishing whatever value it might once have possessed, yet no doubt that value was negligible at best. It's hurried yet inconsequential, blusterous yet banal, expensive yet strangely cheap, bad yet... just bad. And you know how bad it is already - so bad that I feel disheartened even having to will myself to pen a write-up on it, because you all know exactly what's bad about it. Imagine a Saturday morning superhero cartoon - not much of a stretch, indeed, since Fantastic Four is a superhero movie - and the level of quality of this imaginary cartoon. It's terrible, isn't it? The superheroes do little other than pose for the camera, awaiting the beat where one of them blurts out some hideously blunt command or ridiculous theory. They exist in an ugly, visually limited world, with spaces designed merely as vehicles for action, and crude CGI animating the backgrounds; there, they act apparently without motive, thought or appreciation of consequence, and succeed on the basis that they're the good guys, and that's how these cartoons work. That imaginary cartoon is this movie, with the kind of half-arsed attempts at backstory and fleeting acknowledgements of supposedly pertinent social and political issues that you'd expect from something so shoddily formed, crafted almost solely to satiate the easily-distracted minds of otherwise mindless children. Fantastic Four surrenders to nearly every cliche it courts, failing to find the inspiration to mount alternative propositions to these bankrupt creative concepts and instead allowing them to swiftly meet their expected (low) targets and move on to the next. Who cares whose fault this movie is? It'll be your fault for watching it!