The movie wasn’t a fantastic bore but it should have been. It did pretty much nothing to save itself from the terrible pun I wish I could throw at it. And I am not saying the movie was good. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. I can’t even really tell you why it wasn’t but I will surely try.

I think what makes me hesitant to disparage this movie was the characters.

It wasn’t the acting. The acting wasn’t bad. It just was. Everyone was fine for what they were. I even liked this version of the Invisible Woman better because I believe not Anna Kendrick (the girl looks like someone saw her and said, “She looks like Anna Kendrick and people will like that because she will feel familiar”) actually played a smart enough character to naturally be in the situation she was in to get her powers. I liked Jordan, not the basketball player, for similar reasons. The two of them took characters that were pretty one-dimensional in the previous version of the group and flushed them out.

Actually, in all, that is what I think I liked about this movie. There was some justification for why these people were in this situation. With the previous attempt at this foursome I was skeptical of pretty much the entire cast. Who let this be the crew for a space mission? Who let incredibly hot but maybe not that smart siblings go together? Don’t they have some vision requirement about glasses? Wasn’t the Thing a little to heavy to begin with? All those issues are addressed for me with this movie.

That is what I liked about this movie. It plugged some logic holes that kept me for immersing myself in the universe. There was a sense of okayness about how the characters were set up, how the chain of events was set off, how the team grouped up. And really, that was all. The acting wasn’t bad but it was bland. The lighting was Marvel. The filmography was Marvel.

The writing was sad. I was amazed that this was the final script. It wasn’t that the writing was bad. It had some good moments even. It’s just that at the end I was struck by the notion that the writers seemed to have forgotten at one point that they actually needed to put in a fight. That’s the best way to explain my main take away. I believe that at one point the writing team was horrified to realize they had forgotten to have a superhero style plot with a villain and a battle.

You go through the movie learning about the characters and watching them get their powers and in the last few minutes all the actual action takes place. Basically, you have a movie about character development and a bonus episode with a battle tacked on at the end. It ramps up fast and ends just as fast without any F*** yeah moments. The power of teamwork and thinking and grunting in pain wins against someone who should have totally crushed them. It was amazingly mismatched and the solution lacked any of the elegance the previous version of the movie gave us. But what it did give us was a very strong link to the rest of the Marvel universe. So I guess a fight, a conclusion, a bad guy, and the multiverse in one hastily crafted “battle”.

Verdict: If you need to have all the info on the multiverse then sit through it while doing something else. Otherwise, unless it is a catalyst for something else like romance or socializing and there isn’t another movie option you should just skip this. Read a book, listen to birds in the forest, watch your screen saver.