Tires, Bores, Sputters.... Fails.

Rating: 3/10 (24 July 2007)

If you're a fan of the original Fantastic Four, you already know more than I do about the source material. I haven't been weaned on them... I won't conceal that that I've always been drawn to the darker Marvel material such as the Punisher. In fact, "dark and morbid" are probably reserved for the Punisher, if we examine the origins of every major title to hit the news stands in the past 50 years.
But onto the film... where Spiderman revels in its altruistic to a fault pauper protagonist who can't reap his reward for fear of violating some nonexistent superhero code, Fantastic Four is about four heroes who are in the public spotlight. It's the opposite, and whereas I criticized Spiderman for playing the hardship card way too often, Fantastic Four is manufactured cool which is exactly like Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen, it's so boring.
The plot about Silver Surfer coming to earth and whupping our foursome with his intergalactic powers... and then there are a few divergent story lines with say, Doom coming back, and Reed marrying Sue. The dialogue is truly groan-worthy... Reed is not a charismatic geek in the film, he just makes you want to bury your head in your lap. Sue hopelessly adores him and bitches when she finds out he is working on something to help out the US military, and the military's top brass engage in some of the stupidest banter I haven't seen committed to script. (At one point, a general tries to allude to Reed's non-participation in sports in high school... and acts 10 paygrades below his rank while doing so.) I didn't appreciate the obligatory disaster-happens-and-four-work-together-to-save-ppl scenes in the first movie and I don't appreciate them here... they're little more than filler, and they're not very creative in my opinion. X-Men did this with much more flair and suspense, in Fantastic Four it's another yawn-inducing crescendo that barely raises the pulse on this unplausible, unlikeable, mediocre movie. I give it 3. Because at the very least, Jessica Alba is very hot.