It’s one thing for a movie to leave you wanting a sequel and quite another to make you wish you were watching that sequel instead. “Fantastic Four” — the second attempt by Fox and the third by Hollywood in general to bring Marvel Comics’ popular superteam to the big screen — offers glimmers of good things to come in its final moments, but only after the audience has slogged through yet another dispiriting origin story and yet another Earth-rescuing battle in a bland, CG-created nowhere land.
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.