Review: FANTASTIC FOUR: Not That Bad! Not That Good!
August 9th, 2015 by Jordan Grout
If the entire running time of Fantastic Four was a mess and a slog, it would be much easier to write about. But because the film gets so much right in it’s first 45 minutes, talking about it becomes extremely frustrating. The film is a clear example of project that tragically derailed and no one knew how to get it back on track, so they just haphazardly pasted scenes here and there and hoped for the best. The end product mirrors the inter-dimensional planet the titular four travel to: visually interesting, but ultimately lifeless.
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It’s going to take me awhile, but I’m sorry. Every time I hear the movie title The Gift my mind instantly thinks of Sam Raimi’s 2001 film featuring the likes of Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi and Greg Kinnear. I keep having to tell myself it’s 2015 and movie titles are allowed to have the same name as others that have come before it. Is it unoriginal? Hell yes it is, but we have a new player in town and lately producer Jason Blum (The Purge and basically every other horror film out there in recent years) is a force to be reckoned with because the dude is walking on water. He can do no wrong! Of course it doesn’t hurt when your film features the talents of Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton too, but I digress. We’ll talk more about those two down below. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to my gift to you…The Gift movie review. 
Let’s forget about whether this is a good film or not for a minute. In my opinion, here’s a motion picture that should have never been made. I understand all the reasons why it was made, the rights involved, securing the property and what not, but come on, really. Do the trailers for this new Fantastic Four film look any better than the two Jessica Alba incarnations that came before? In my opinion, they do not. Actually, the trailers looked worst. However, that’s just my two cents because I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but I rather liked the first two Jessica Alba infused Fantastic Four films. They were fun, lighthearted and entertaining. And hey! If not for those two Fantastic Four films, the world would have never found the Captain America they all know and love today in that of Johnny Storm. Ah, Johnny Storm. Don’t even get me started on that topic (I’m not going to play that card). 
There was a period of time in my life back in the middle 2000’s where I just wasn’t a fan of Tom Cruise. Maybe it was his relationship with Katie Holmes, or maybe it was all his scientology crap, I don’t know, but I just couldn’t watch his films for awhile. I remember catching Mission: Impossible III one late night on a Dell Latitude laptop (yuck!) while working third shift in a data center, but other than that I had no idea what I was missing out on. Then came news of Tom scaling one of the tallest buildings in the world in Dubai in the fourth entry of this series, and that was all it took. My butt was definitely in a theater chair to see that. Ever since that Tom Cruise can do no wrong in my books churning out incredible flicks left and right like Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow, just to name a few. 
Believe it or not, July 29th’s Vacation is actually the fifth theatrical and the seventh total installment of the National Lampoon’s Vacation series. However, that stat does little to phase or impress me. While I loved some of the earlier National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the trailers for 2015’s Vacation absolutely rocked. So much so that I felt if a trailer can elicit that much laughter from me, I just have to see the finished product and ensure there are still some good, unexpected laughs to be had with the feature. And that ladies and gentlemen is why we’re here today to discuss in-depth the merits and hopeful laughs of Vacation. And I know this is digression, but God I could really use one (referring to the very real dictionary definition of the word vacation). Haha. 
I really wanted to love this movie. I really did. Although the special effects are very amazing and rather stunning; it is the same old same old Happy Madison movie formula. Sandler is the hero who doesn’t have self-confidence, James is the best friend who does believe in the hero and serves as a moral compass, Dinklage plays the over-sexed and inappropriate sleazy friend, and Gad plays the under-sexed and awkward nerd. It was disappointing. 
Southpaw is defined in the sport of boxing as the stance where the boxer has his right hand and right foot forward, leading with right jabs, and following with a left cross right hook. Southpaw is the normal stance for a left-handed boxer. Fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, for example, was a southpaw. Therefore, I think you can pretty much conjure up that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Southpaw is a southpaw. You picking up what I’m dropping here because I’m pretty much lost on what point I want to make. So now that you know what a southpaw is I guess we can move on to talking about the 2015 sports drama film, Southpaw. Just out of curiosity how many times did I mention my keyword in this first paragraph? If you said seven times, have someone in the room where you’re at clap for you. 
“Ant-Man” is so funny, so charming, and so confident that its absurdly goofy premise never spirals into unbelievability. What director Peyton Reed and screenwriters Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd have created is an absolute joy to behold. The action is thrilling, the characters are engaging, the drama is emotional, and the surprises are actually surprising. The dialogue and gags are flat out hilarious all the way through. I haven’t laughed this much since last year’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” With such an oddball premise, it’s approached the only way a film like this should be, which is to fill it with as much weirdness as possible. There are moments that reach Joe Dante levels of zaniness.
Somewhere there’s a big joke in all of this, that is if you’re familiar with all the Ant-Man drama over the past year. Between y’all and I, it’s a wonder this movie even got made, nonetheless successfully completed before its official July 17th release date. Now with most movies, there are some behind the scenes drama at play and some moments that may have made producers wonder is this ever going to be made. However, with Ant-Man, not only is this film almost a decade in the making of, but there’s a huge (no pun to the subject matter here) heaping of drama still left on the plate here to be cleaned off. Will we ever find out the official reasons as to why Edgar Wright and Marvel parted ways? Who knows! All I know is that it would make one hell of a two-hour documentary one day, the Marvel film that could have been. Oh well. You know what they say. Big things have small (pun intended now) beginnings, such is the cinematic superhero story of Ant-Man. 
To say the Terminator franchise has been a troubled one these past two entries would be like saying there’s a distinctive taste difference between vanilla and chocolate ice cream. It’s that apparent. Just when you thought Terminator Salvation was going to reinvigorate the franchise, production of a fifth film went right down the toilet slapped with bankruptcy forcing the property to once again go up for sale. The question was who’s going to buy it? You? Me? Why not Annapurna Pictures with distribution help from Paramount? And then there’s that spelling of “Genisys” in this film’s title to deal with. Oh well! You can’t win them all. I suppose in the end we should all be thanking the Gods for even letting a fifth film in this troubled Terminator franchise to exist, right? Absolutely! 
I haven’t wanted to walk out a movie so badly since last summer’s “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” also written/directed/starring Seth MacFarlane. If “Ted 2” doesn’t make my top 5 Worst Films of the Year in December, I’m going to be horrified. Lazy, pandering, boring, unbearably long, and excruciatingly unfunny, “Ted 2” is a complete waste of time and money.
There is a genuine, chaotic sense of menace that possesses every frame of “Creep,” and it will dig deep into your psyche and fester long after the film’s 82 minutes are over. The “found-footage” style of filmmaking is one that has remained stagnant for many years, employed only because it’s fast and cheap. If it is to successfully continue, auteurs should study “Creep” and recognize why it works so well. However, if found-footage were to swiftly evaporate from the mainstream, it will have ended on a very high note.
I have to admit, I wasn’t instantly the biggest fan of Ted upon its release. Despite being a huge Family Guy fan, it ironically took some time for me to warm up to being a fan of a flick that deals with a talking teddy bear living in our real world. Thanks in part to the chemistry between Mark Wahlberg, who’s hysterical in this role, and Seth MacFarlane, who infuses life into the fuzzy Ted, warming up was a relatively quick process. For when Ted fell below $8 on Blu-ray a couple Black Fridays ago, I thus became a fan due to my economical choice to invest in the feature and give it a second chance at redemption. Therefore, you don’t need to sign me up to go see Ted 2, I’m already there and onboard. See how wishy washy I can be? It’s terrible. 
I haven’t seen Alan Trezza’s short film from 2008, called “Burying the Ex,” but I have seen the feature length adaptation of the same name, which Trezza also wrote, and I can tell you that it should have stayed a short. It is appropriate then, that while watching the film, I kept thinking to myself how there’s only about 30 minutes of plot, stretched out thin to 90 minutes. 
Finally delivering on the promise of John Hammond, Jurassic World is a theme park we’ve all dreamed of. A place where people can ride a Triceratops. A place where you can roam in the middle of a Stegosaurus herd in a gyro sphere. Where you can take a boat tour down the river, and travel from attraction to attraction on a high tech monorail. It’s fully functional, with enough inspiration for ten parks.
