Poor Fantastic Four! The buzz has been so poisonous for this comic-book movie that after overwhelmingly negative reviews rolled in this week, even director Josh Trank was moved to disavow the film’s final cut. But in the face of so much that has gone wrong here, is there anything in Fantastic Four that’s somehow so wrong, it’s actually right? I would argue yes, and I point you to the most audacious thing featured in this very expensive, very sleepy movie: the very fake Reshoots Wig they slapped on female lead Kate Mara. Hoo, boy, is it a sight to behold.
The fact that a considerable chunk of Fantastic Four was scuttled and reshot is not news: In fact, some suspect that the cost of those reshoots is one of the reasons why the movie’s planned 3-D conversion was torpedoed. What is surprising, however, is just how little the filmmakers seemed to care about continuity when it came to Kata Mara’s friggin’ head. It’s so glaringly obvious when the recently shorn Mara is wearing her Reshoots Wig that her hair’s length, color, and texture varies from scene to scene (and sometimes even from shot to shot). If you sit through the end credits, you will see the names of hundreds of special-effects technicians who drove this movie’s budget into nine digits and spent two years laboring away on Fantastic Four’s smallest details; it is almost perverse, then, that something as important as real-looking hair on a lady was given less priority than whether or not the Thing looked like Floory.
While this fake-hair snafu might sound like one of the film’s many problems, I actually found it sort of endearing. This is an awfully quiet, airless movie, and after a few dour punch lines in the early going, there’s little intentional entertainment to be had. Eventually, I began to regard Mara’s Reshoots Wig as kind of a lifeline: Every time I found myself wondering why the characters never went outside or why Jamie Bell and Michael B. Jordan had virtually no lines in their big mainstream superhero movie, I could count on that Reshoots Wig to pop up somewhere and make me laugh. How blonde and shellacked is it? After the movie ended, in lieu of a post-credits tag featuring Nick Fury, I expected Megyn Kelly to show up and invite Sue to join Fox News.
Already I’ve seen fanboys try to explain away Sue’s hair horror-show by noting that a one-year time jump occurs in the middle of the movie, which, theoretically, would give Sue plenty of time to ditch the chic, roots-baring lob she has when we meet her and then transition to a gold silk hairpiece that looks like Austin Scarlett made it entirely out of corn. These defenders are well-intentioned people, but they have probably never seen a picture of Kim Zolciak. Do not trust them. Let it be known, definitively, that the Invisible Woman’s two major powers are wig-wearing and bubble-driving, and while the latter ability is awfully cute (she envelops so many people in bubbles that she might as well be in Milon’s Secret Castle), it’s the power of Sue’s Reshoots Wig that intermittently makes Fantastic Four what it ought to be: a lot more fun.
