Metacritic reviews

Ultimately, Fox’s stab at reviving one of its inherited Marvel properties feels less like a blockbuster for this age of comics-oriented tentpoles than it does another also-ran — not an embarrassment, but an experiment that didn’t gel.

Director Josh Trank, whose debut feature “Chronicle” put a smart new spin on superhero tropes, has assembled a quartet of engaging, charismatic performers and stranded them in a miasma of exposition and set-up that sinks the movie.

This reboot of the Marvel superhero franchise is a film of two halves: the first likeable and fun, the second tiresome and loud.

The cast are some of the most promising actors of their generation, but what chemistry there is between them is swept away by wave after wave of expository dialogue and ludicrous exclamation.

Ponderous, pretentious and, most damning of all, just not much fun.

As an origin story that’s all origins and no story, there’s a hollow, stale feeling to this occasionally admirable attempt to Nolanise Marvel’s dysfunctional family.

A good cast led by Miles Teller gets swallowed up in a narrative that grows progressively more muddled and tedious.

In turning his back on the familiar tropes of blockbuster comic book movies, Trank doesn't have a clear new identity for Fantastic Four to distinguish itself with, and the result is a movie rich with possibilities, but trapped in the basic structure of a superhero movie, with no idea of how to wholly circumvent traditional expectations.

Fantastic Four is so bereft of all the things we expect from a superhero movie — humor, excitement, adventure, awe — that it plays like a drawn-out pilot episode for an upcoming TV series no one would ever watch again.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.