"Fantastic Four" is a profound mess. It's not fun. It's not exciting. It's far from action-packed. And it's most certainly not fantastic.

| May 18, 2018

A poorly constructed, ineptly executed, flatfooted piece of Branded Product that plays as though it were written by a piece of software fed every superhero movie script to date and instructed to synthesize them.

| May 27, 2016

A lightweight and basically unnecessary attempt to once again bring some cinematic life to one of the lesser teams in the Marvel Universe.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 13, 2015

The newest iteration of Stan Lee and Joltin' Jack Kirby's classic superheroes plays like some misguided cross between an Eighties Afterschool Special and a failed WB tween-heartthrob outing sans the emotional depth.

| Original Score: 0.5/5 | Aug 13, 2015

The latest iteration of "Fantastic Four" is far from what its name suggests. Profoundly uninteresting, it hits all the beats of the standard superhero movie, but provides nothing in the way of imagination or magic.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 12, 2015

Laughably cheesy, bordering on Zardoz levels of simplicity.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 10, 2015

For anyone who remembers the strip as drawn by Jack Kirby in its wildly inventive 60s prime, this is beyond depressing.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 9, 2015

If you would like to admire the awfulness of Fantastic Four without actually having to sit through it--or if you've already seen the movie and are still reeling from the experience--read on.

| Aug 8, 2015

Sadly, in the final 20 minutes, the piece teeters more suddenly and more completely over a metaphorical cliff than any film in recent memory.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 8, 2015

The special effects are cheesy, the acting perfunctory, the plotting pallid.

| Original Score: D | Aug 7, 2015

It's not wholesale terrible -- just depressingly mediocre, and at a certain point you sort of start wishing it WERE definitively terrible, because that would at least make it more entertaining or give it a certain strange raison d'etre.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 7, 2015

Above all, what distinguishes the film's approach is the faith it puts in its young lead actors, especially Teller, who made an impact as an ambitious jazz student in Whiplash and is no less impressive and thoughtful here.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2015

I wonder if it escaped from the 20th Century Fox lot as a tax write-off.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 7, 2015

The entire experience is shameful -- for us, for the filmmakers, for whoever at the studio had the job of creating the ads, in which the cast appear to be starring in hostage posters.

| Aug 7, 2015

The resulting film combines the worst aspects of gritty reboots with the worst aspects of cartoony, comic book logic.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2015

A light subversion of today's blockbuster aesthetics... Trank isn't using characters with built-in visual spectacle to wow us. He's inviting us to react with sympathy to what is basically the bodily horror of their new abilities.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2015

The negative buzz around the new Fantastic Four is so radioactive you could almost expect to develop superpowers just by reading about it.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 7, 2015

It's as if the whole Marvel thing got in the way of the indie movie everyone secretly wanted to make - a squeamishness that does no one any favours.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2015

A comic book movie that is bizarrely short on humour and action.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 7, 2015

The film's dynamic is completely off, offering too much build and too little payoff.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 7, 2015