You are getting sleepy … Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller and Kate Mara. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

Viewers may be forgiven for mistaking the title of this week’s Marvel blockbuster with the sleep setting on an adjustable mattress. Fantastic Four is a reboot of a franchise last attempted in 2005 with a film whose most notable feature may have been a brief cameo by over-the-top Terra TV journo Maria Salas (watch her talk to Dwayne Johnson about Cuban Food here).

Fox recast the supergroup and hired young director Josh Trank for what promised to be a movie that’s more character-driven than action packed. There’s inherently nothing wrong with that, and despite a troubled production history, Trank’s involvement is what made me hope the movie wouldn’t be just another Marvel joint. It’s not—it’s worse.

On paper it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea: take the director of the solid indie film Chronicle—a found-footage sci-fi thriller about teenagers who develop superpowers—and translate that to the big screen pyrotechnics of a late-summer blockbuster with a fresh young cast.

In its early scenes, Fantastic Four seems like it might work out alright, if not, uh, fantastic. The film starts in the long ago year of 2007, just two years after the last movie failed. Young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) is a nerdy kid working on a teleportation machine in his parent’s garage; the only friend he seems to have is Ben (Evan Hannemann), who helps Reed out with car parts from his family’s junkyard. These scenes are shot in a slightly misty filter of nostalgia (for eight whole years ago!) that suggests ‘80s coming of age movies.

To some extent the casting does this as well. None of the young cast are huge stars; Miles Teller has come a long way from playing douche-bros like the one in 21 and Over, a fratboy comedy that I theorized was actually a thinly disguised Ai Weiwei homage. Although he comes off like an arrogant brat in a recent Esquire interview, he still exudes an endearing vulnerability onscreen; his looks recalling a young John Cusack but with a wider range and more seasoned features.

Teller plays the older Reed Richards, and with Jamie Bell (who’s come a long way from Billy Elliot), Fantastic Four briefly becomes a buddy movie. If the cast seems younger than that of the 2005 film, the script places its superhero team at an age when their bodies are still changing, their growth and maturity threatened by powers that reflect the challenges of adulthood.

This would be all well and good if the characters and their chemistry went anywhere. Even a bloated super-product like The Avengers movies feature superheroes whose powers come off like cartoon distortions of their personalities. But when a botched teleportation experiment gives the four their superpowers, they seem arbitrary: sure, Susan Storm (Kate Mara) may feel invisible as a woman, but Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) doesn’t get any mileage out of his fiery powers, Mister Fantastic just disappears with little dramatic impact and The Thing is a pile of rocks with no inner life of rage or quiet to speak of. And as the special effects crank up, the dialogue gets worse. I don’t have a problem with a Marvel movie being light on action, but when the action finally starts, it’s even less exciting than the character development. The villain, Dr. Doom (Toby Kebbel), is little more than an inexpressive machine in goth’s clothing.

I was hoping I could tell you that the movie wasn’t as bad as its buzz, but even its director has gotten in on the act. Trank recently tweeted, then deleted, that “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

We may never know if the director’s version of the movie would have been any good, but we do know that if the studio’s version has any claims to an essence of the fantastic, it’s in the fantastic nap it’s likely to induce.

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Fantastic Four
Directed by Josh Trank
Written by Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater and Josh Trank.
With Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and languageRunning time 100 minutes.
Opens today on the back of your eyelids.