Reblogged from my Letterboxd list:
Seriously, screw the internet pile-on – there’s really a lot to like about the Fantastic Four reboot. Josh Trank’s film (from a screenplay by him, Jeremy Slater and Simon Kinberg) adds a more ‘rational’ twist, in terms of internal logic, to the FF’s inherently silly origin story, eschewing the already dated campiness of the noughties films (so that it’s more tonally consistent with its sibling X-Men franchise) and borrowing liberally from Cronenberg’s The Fly in its fable of ambition gone awry.
Which one could say about the film itself, actually. What it builds to isn’t where it goes, with a lengthy but engaging first act skipping over the second and straight into a half-baked finale that’ll have you convinced whole swathes of plot and character development were carelessly hacked out just to trim down the running time and ‘get to the action’. That, or it’s a case of the story escaping the creator’s control, like Frankenstein’s movie. Either way, it doesn’t end well. But if not for the last 30 minutes, it really doesn’t deserve all this disdain.