My feelings for Fox’s rebooted Fantastic Four property, much like the film itself, are all over the place. With director Josh Trank squaring the focus on the men and women (or, in this case, boys and girls) behind the powers, Fantastic Four had the opportunity to be, at the very least, something different from the crop of annual superhero movies, those with their quick quips and even quicker action beats hogging the entirety of the run time. If they got it right, you leave the theater wide-eyed and sugar rushing, “When’s the next one?” Fantastic Four is not that movie…until it is. And then it tries so hard to be just that that it ends up cutting its nose to spite its face.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was actually kind of digging it for a while. Like, I totes liked it. Seriously. Right until it up and transmogrified into a superhero movie. Because, if we’re being perfectly honest, as a superhero movie, The Fantastic Four is terrible. As a “body horror/lab experiment gone horribly wrong” flick, it had potential; vast potential; potential that Trank taps into on more than one occasion. This is before said potential is yanked from the screen by the invisible (though wholly present) hand of studio interests. You can almost feel the suits at Fox rapping Trank over the knuckles, “This doesn’t fit the formula!!” Their interference is omnipresent and oppressive; their rock-hard monkeying a million times more visible than Sue Storm. When they finally force The Thing to utter that horribly hokey catchphrase of his, it certainly feels like clobbering time.

As they tweak and micromanage this Frankenstein creation into the wanna-be spitting image of the superhero printing press that is the MCU, all life is drained from Fantastic Four. As the assembly line formula is vigorously, aggressively, tactlessly applied, the film melts down and explodes in their face like a sick, slick hundred-million dollar bukkake. And this is one money shot I wouldn’t mind seeing pixelated.

When you really break it down, Fantastic Four is indeed a lot like bukkake. (For those who are unsure of what that is exactly, I would not advise a Google search.) In Trank’s superhero opus, there’s too many people trying to jam their seed in one plot; too many diverse globulars of ideas, too many assorted ropes of thought, to fit on one movie’s mug. The end result is as messy as…well you get the picture.

The film starts inauspiciously as a young Reed Richards presents his molecular doohickey something or other (or a teleporter to us Neanderthalic laymen) to his indifferent classroom. Though his teacher (crusher of dreams that he is) is thoroughly unimpressed, Reed manages to win the attention of classmate Ben Grimm. They partner up and seven years later, Reed (now Miles Teller) and Ben (now Jamie Bell) have perfected their transporter (somewhat) and win the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) at a high school science fair.

Inducted to join a research team toying with the kinks of inter-dimensional travel, Reed joins goody-two-shoes scientist Sue Storm (Kate Mara), car-racin’-rebel Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and ex-project leader/doctor with a temper, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Now, I know the need to remain true to source material is sadly one that tops Maslow’s Movie Hierarchy of Needs but you would think the crew would smell a bad omen having a dude surnamed Von Doom on their squad. Like the film’s sudden last act derailment, it’s never brought to question.

Anyone who watched the 90s cartoon, read the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comics, saw the dreadful Tim Story versions or has heard the name Fantastic Four knows that that inter-dimensional travel goes screwy and the crew of scientists end up with silly abilities like being super stretchy or make of rocks and stuff. What Trank is able to do with that transformation though makes for by far and away the film’s most interesting angles.

Rather than stick with the typical training montages that see our heroes learning about their newly acquired powers to shredding Slash solos and plenty of jump cuts (like a kid tinkering with his newly discovered member), Trank exploits the horror that is discovering your anatomy is grossly, irreparably altered. You thought puberty was bad, imagine waking up as a living 9-foot anthill of Corundum (what a conundrum!) A scene that finds Reed wake to find himself stretched impossibly thin, arms and legs distended at crude lengths and strapped hauntingly to a lab table, is absolutely horrifying. Ben’s screams from down the hall – animalistic yelps of confusion and self-loathing – are equally haunting. These genetic mutations aren’t a dream come true, they’re a fucking nightmare.

That’s where the movie should have stayed; the horrors of being a superhero. The sheer panic that is becoming something (and someone) new. The terrifying realization that you’re life as you knew it is effectively over. And with such a grim tone, committed, earnest performances, and an often insufferably joyless script, Fantastic Four had the opportunity to subvert the glory of being super.

Kids braying that they want to fly instead could have left the theater with the desire to never go near a glowing pile of green ooze. The experience could have been scary and visceral and real; Fantastic Four could have been The Fly meets The Toxic Avenger. Instead, the off button is flicked on the whole body horror aspect with such flagrant disregard for anything that had come before it that there is no hope of tonal consistency, no dream for quality as the movie runs itself into the ground. Fantastic Four’s last 25 minutes is spent shoehorning its narrative into what has become “the expectation of a superhero movie”. And like Cinderella’s fated glass slipper on ugly stepsister Annastasia, the shoe just doesn’t fit. Cramming or no.