The Four (2012) Movie Review!!!

Is this the real Fantastic Four??  Read on to find out.

Oh dear…  I think that pretty much sums up this movie.  I’ve done a good job to be able to forget most of it but will see if I can remember something of a synopsis for you.

We start in ye olde China where we are introduced to the Department Six Constabulary, a special police force set up to investigate and take down big criminals.  All dressed in black, they come across as a mixture of FBI & SWAT.  Then we have the Divine Constabulary who are more akin to the X-Men.  A super-team featuring people with special powers, set up on the authority of the king.  The two teams meet investigating a counterfeiting ring in the Song Dynasty. 

The head of Dept-6 is not happy to hear there is a second and likely more powerful team than his and does little to hide this, creating instant tension between the two.  He sends his top agent into the Devine Constabulary as a mole to try and get info that may allow him to break the case first.

But as always, things get complicated when an unusual love triangle starts to develop between this character and women on both teams.

We are introduced to the characters powers – ripped straight from the pages of Marvel and DC.  One of the guys, Chao Deng, turns into a Hulk like creature and I still haven’t quite figured out what Collin Chou and Ronald Cheng’s powers were, think they could fight well and jump really high, actually everyone seems to be able to jump high and float around in this!  Collin Chou is severely underutilized as always.  Then finally there’s Professor Xavier, sorry, Yifei Liu’s character.  She plays a psychic who cannot walk and is bound to a special wheelchair with X’s on the wheels.  Okay, maybe there weren’t X’s there but you get the idea.  This was a blatant attempt to cash in on the superhero bandwagon, which failed in gloriously magnificent style!

It was terrible.

I feel so bad to have let you all down.  It was only a week or two ago that I said that it’s a pretty safe bet to think you have a decent movie on your hands if it has Anthony Wong in it.  That is so clearly not the case here, although, as the powerful head of the Divine Constabulary, he is still the best thing in this.

This could have been good.  Mixing modern day superpowers with an ancient China storyline is a cool idea just executed really poorly.  The subpar CGI doesn’t help either.

There are times when it looks like the actors are really having fun and that comes across on the screen.  These are the most entertaining moments but very few and far between.

At the end of the day, this movie is just a big schizophrenic mess.  It can’t figure out what it wants to be.  There’s hardly any action, the love triangle is sigh inducing, the superpowers are all lame imitations of things we’ve seen before and it’s never explained why they have these powers in the first place.  It’s possible that things were left unexplained in this as a set-up for subsequent movies but I just couldn’t care less. 

I really can’t bring myself to go on.  Save your money and don’t bother watching this.

Rating 1/5 for the cool scene featuring Anthony Wong at the end when he takes down the zombies.  Yes, there are zombies in this too.. Don’t ask!

Bobby