These Superhero Films SUCK!

5. Fantastic Four

The Fantastic Four have had an experience rougher than The Things gnarled todger when it comes to silver screen adaptations, as time and time again we've seen the first family of comics dragged across the coals both critically and commercially.

From changing key elements of the established canon for seemingly no reason to turning Galactus into a giant space fart, to genuinely rotten behind the scenes stories about directors adding in CGI tears because apparently, Jessica Alba was "ugly" when she cried for real, what should have been an easy recipe of "superhero family beat bad guys into base elements" ending up churning out a deep-fried and very snotty tissue that the bloke behind the counter is claiming is a "cheeseburger"

When looking at the franchise as a whole it was easy to point fingers at the problems limiting its potential. The terrible villain motivations and portrayals, the often laughable CGI implementation, and of course the acting which was both scenery-chewing and yet utterly starved of depth. It was a woeful cocktail for sure, but for some reason, the 2015 reboot of the series looked to add more problems rather than fix any.

I say this because the only things that worked for the prior two flicks, namely the sheer goofiness of the events could sometimes provoke a modicum of enjoyment, were totally stripped away and instead replaced with what I imagine Ben Shapiro's soul is made of aka a lack of any human emotion whatsoever.

Actually, scratch that, the movie does contain one emotion very strongly and that's utter contempt for its source material and by extension its audience. From attaching "it's clobbering time" to Ben's older brother, to government researchers attending a school science fair, to my personal favorite, characters getting annoyed they can't pilot their mad experiment into space despite not having any formal astronaut training. Like come on, you're literally not qualified to run this in the slightest.

Add to this an overtly depressing tone, grim color edit, and a villain who literally just decides to be evil on a whim to give us a third act, and we have the makings of a project that tried to ghost the tone of the original but lost all of the playful spirits along the way thus leaving it dead on arrival at the box office.