‘Fantastic Four’ is a fantastic fail

MUCH of ‘Fantastic Four’ is set in a barren place called Planet Zero — and you may feel stranded there yourself for this plodding, joyless and stillborn reboot.

MUCH of Josh Trank’s abysmal Fantastic Four is set in a barren place called Planet Zero — and you may feel stranded there yourself for all 100 minutes of this plodding, joyless and stillborn Marvel reboot.

A lousy script, unfocused direction, incoherent editing, shockingly terrible special effects — and, probably, panicked studio executives — have left its four talented stars muddling through a dull superhero origin story with zero pay-off.

The sluggish first hour is devoted to showing how teleportation experiments by high school student Reed Richards (Miles Teller) lead to his being recruited by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey). For reasons that are never made clear, Storm wants to send Reed, Storm’s daughter Sue (Kate Mara) and son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), along with some others, to an alternate dimension.

Kate Mara and Michael B. Jordan play brother and sister.

Their hasty trip to Planet Zero doesn’t go well. Sue turns into the Invisible Girl, Johnny into the Human Torch and Reed into Mr. Fantastic, while Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), who’s also along for the ride, gets turned into the Thing, a rock-like creature with superhuman strength. None of these superhero names, by the way, is used in the movie.

Meanwhile, their project leader, Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), is stranded on Planet Zero, which resembles a collection of leftover sets from low-budget 1980s sci-fi flicks.

When the four new superheroes return, Dr. Storm’s boss, Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), promptly turns them over to the military for use as potential weapons. But Reed escapes and is tracked down a year later for a return expedition to Planet Zero, where Victor — now known simply as Doctor Doom — plans to destroy Earth by sucking it into Planet Zero.

There is all too much sucking going on in this fiasco, which is riddled with reams of inane expository dialogue and endless shots of computer screens. Utterly missing are any characters or situations audiences can remotely care about.

Trank — who directed the overpraised superhero movie Chronicle (2012) on a comparatively minuscule budget but is in way over his head here — futilely tries to make this something darker than the usual Marvel movie. But the Fantastic Four don’t really lend themselves to his gloomy approach.

We’d be trying to cover up too if we’d starred in this shocker.

The two Fantastic Four films Tim Story made in 2005 and 2007 may not have been very memorable, but at least they were fun. You can’t say that about this one, whose few lame one-liners (“What is coming?” Reed asks. “Doom,” says Doom.) seem to have been thrown in as an afterthought.

The cast seems committed to Trank’s way-too-sober approach — which apparently included orders to deliver every line in a monotone — but their lack of team chemistry is fatal. We’re reminded every 10 minutes that Sue and Johnny are brother and sister, and that Reed and Ben are best friends, but their performances never convince us.

By the time they get swallowed up in the hard-to-follow, CGI-heavy climax, it’s clear the actors are as lost as we are. In the final scene — the only one that elicited any kind of audience reaction at the screening I attended, though it was derisive laughter — it seemed they were working at gunpoint as they cheerfully discussed further adventures.

Given this disaster, any plans for a sequel seem more like a threat than a promise.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.

Originally published as ‘Fantastic Four’ is a fantastic fail