Perfectly mediocre

Rating: 5/10 (11 July 2005)

In a long year of bland movies, lackluster marketing and a series of summer duds, expectations are pretty low for The Fantastic Four. Though it's not as bad as it could have been, it's nowhere near as good as it should have been.
The writing is pretty run of the mill stuff. While the script avoids the cringing embarrassment of Daredevil, neither the plot nor the characterization stands out as anything beyond average. There seems to have been a struggle between Michael Francis' desire for emotion and realism, and Mark Frost's popular sense of how to get a story moving. Writing by committee rarely works and the two's strengths cancel each other out. The result is a story that lacks any surprise or tension, populated by characters with no depth or motivation.
A good director and great actors can sometimes save a mediocre script, but here we have neither. Tim Story seems way out of his depth dealing with a movie of this scale. Where there should be no-holds-barred, jaw-dropping spectacle, we have action scenes that play like a rerun of The Dukes of Hazard. Many scenes simply run on too long, the characters are left standing around wondering what to do next, and the whole movie has an oddly sedate pacing to it. The actors struggle to bring life to such lazily written, one-dimensional characters. Nobody is expecting King Lear in a comic-book movie, but a little depth of character and believable motivation goes a long way to make us care about what is going on. Michael Chiklis brings a humanity to The Thing that steals every scene in which he appears, but he has the advantage of having a clearly identifiable 'disability' to milk for emotional effect.
The CGI seems decidedly third rate, as though the project was given to the trainees to do between the priority assignments. It's rare to see something as simple as a ship floating in space look so unrealistic, and the more complex effects, particularly with Reed Richards' stretching, were terrible. Johnny Storm's motion capture was amateurish, close-ups of his face while engulfed in flame being particularly bad. The Thing never looked like anything but latex, and in many scenes you could actually see the rubber creasing at the joints. Its design gave no sense of real solidity and never for a moment do you believe that he is made of stone.
Overall, from the script to the performances to the visual effects, Fantastic Four reeks of a low-priority project put into the hands of individuals who aren't quite ready for the responsibility. Maybe we've finally come to the point where $100 million just isn't enough to successfully pull off this kind of movie any more.