Director: Josh Trank
Running Time: 110 mins
Certificate: 12A
Release Date: August 6th 2015
When even a film’s own cast start mumbling about how they haven’t seen it, that it’s probably a bit rubbish, and that it’s not a critics’ film, you know you’re in trouble. Sure enough, this latest version of a story which had a perfectly decent outing all of 10 years ago turns out to be a dud. It’s the usual reasons to blame too – a dog of a script, wooden half-hearted acting and a boring story about saving the world. To be fair, the special effects are actually pretty good, and some minor characters put in a shift, but in the preview screening people started walking out after 10 minutes.
Do we really have to go through the whole set-up of how they become the Four? Apparently we do, so we get a full hour of Teller’s Reed Richards inventing a teleportal machine which sends sand, chimps and then humans to an undiscovered planet that turns out to have an inexhaustible supply of power. He teams up with Johnny Storm (Jordan, ok), Sue Storm (Mara, half-asleep), Victor von Doom (Kebbell, chewing scenery) and his old pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell, adequate) to complete the work, but an accident sees Doom stranded on the planet alone while the other four return to Earth with strange powers. [Read more…]