...there is little sense of wonder or excitement in Fantastic Four. It's merely a middling contender among a surplus of superhero movies.
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I've said it before but it bears repeating: Never trust a film that can't make up its mind about its own title. The front of the keep case calls it "Fantastic 4," with an Arabic numeral; the back of the keep case calls it "Fantastic Four," spelled out; and the movie's title screen has it both ways. I figure if the filmmakers couldn't decide on something as simple as that, what else did they have trouble deciding. Blame it on the comic book, if you will.
Either I completely missed something in this 2005 live-action movie version of the famous comic-book heroes, or the movie is a testament to the enduring popularity of the printed page. Certainly, there is nothing about the film to warrant the immense profits it generated at the box office.
Like the first entries in most series of live-action comic-book adaptations, "Fantastic Four" spends the opening half of its running time explaining how the heroes get their super powers and the second half describing how the heroes thwart an evil genius. Unfortunately, the development of the characters' super powers is pretty bland and the later conflict is even blander.
To make up for the lack of plot and characterization, director Tim Story uses a plethora of CGI special effects and raucous music, apparently hoping to hide the film's flaws. It only accentuates the problem and when they're combined, they're deadly. Tim Story, incidentally, is the fellow whose two most notable previous movies were "Barbershop" and "Taxi." Now, he's one for three, and if he were a baseball player, hitting .333 wouldn't be too bad.
You are probably already familiar with the four main characters; most people are. I confess, though, that because I have not read a comic book in fifty years, I was only vaguely aware of them. Anyway, the leader of the group is Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), a scientist down to his last dime who approaches an old schoolmate, Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), a superrich and utterly unscrupulous technology industrialist, with a scheme to enhance Mankind. Richards tells Doom that a high-energy cosmic storm might have triggered the evolution of all planetary life and that such a storm cloud is heading for Earth's orbit any minute. Then he gets Doom to fund a research project out in space, using one of Doom's space stations. You know what happens. Richards takes Doom and some pals along, and they all get radiated, their DNA altered, and acquire super powers. Always happens.
Richards gets the power to stretch to incredible proportions and gains the nickname Mr. Fantastic. His ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), who is Doom's current love interest, can become invisible and create force fields, becoming The Invisible Girl. Sue's brother, the hotshot Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), can turn himself on fire, bursting into flames, and fly; he calls himself The Human Torch. And Reed's best friend, Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), turns into stone and Johnny calls him The Thing. They become the Fab Four, called the Fantastic 4, or whatever, while their so-called friend Victor turns into a metallic being with electrical powers strong enough to zap people to death. They call him bad.
The best comic-book superheroes transcend the genre when they're adapted to the screen--Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, even Hellboy. The heroes of "Fantastic Four," however, remain bound up in two-dimensional, comic-book conventions and personalities. Nothing they do or say is in the least bit inspired, unusual, arresting, stirring, thought-provoking, or engrossing. They simply do and say exactly what we expect them to do and say, everything according to formula.
The actors are without exception attractive people, Gruffudd and McMahon looking like soap-opera stars, Alba beautiful but innocuous, and Evans annoying, leaving only Chiklis to carry the show with his good humor and touching vulnerability. If the other characters had been scripted as well as The Thing, the show might have been more watchable. Because The Thing is the only one of the main characters permanently altered in the space accident, he's the only one in the picture a viewer can even remotely care about.
Yet even The Thing finds himself in frustratingly outlandish situations. At one point he decides to rescue a jumper on a busy bridge, only to endanger the lives of about eight hundred other people driving the route. Somehow, he is then applauded when he subsequently saves the lives of the very people he put in danger. I'm reminded of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." George tells Lenny to jump in the Sacramento River, but Lenny can't swim so George has to rescue him. Lenny, being slow, is totally grateful to George for saving his life, completely forgetting it was George who told him to jump in the river in the first place. I don't know what excuse the people in "Fantastic Four" have.
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