Alongside Green Lantern this is the nadir of the modern superhero genre

Rating: 2/10 (11 July 2016)

While superhero flicks have never been my favourite type of movies, I've always been willing to give them a go, and I've enjoyed most I've watched in recent years. Sadly, FANTASTIC FOUR is not one of those movies; it's one of the most appalling superhero films I've watched, worse than the camp classics of the 1960s and the cheesiness spawned during the 1980s. The movie fails because it has no heart; it goes through the motions without ever offering anything anywhere near profound, exciting, or indeed interesting. Despite a workable premise, the film seems to steal bits from SPIDER-MAN, THE FLY, and many other classic movies, throwing them together into a jumbled mess that just gets worse as it goes on.
You can't blame the cast. Well, you can, but at least there are a couple of good performers in there; namely Ioan Gruffudd and Michael Chiklis. Chiklis, the bald, hulking anti-hero of TV series THE SHIELD lends solid value as The Thing, a man made out of rock, but too often he's made the butt of jokes, and he never becomes more than a walking man-mountain. Ioan Gruffudd looks as smooth and dashing as he did in KING ARTHUR, but he's similarly wasted, left standing around and looking wooden throughout. At least he's better than newcomer Chris Evans, who'll make you want to smash his teeth in about ten seconds after you first saw him. Jessica Alba, who managed to do sexy in SIN CITY, is equally bad here, reaching new lows of blandness. The bad guy, a villain named Doctor Doom, should be scary or Willem Dafoe style OTT, but instead it's the slick, slimy and miscast Julian McMahon who just kind of slides through the film without making an effort.
The special effects in the film are surprisingly bad. Alba, as the Invisible Woman, has an okay look, but you can't really do much with invisibility that hasn't been done before. The Human Torch is better; the effects of him flying through the air and burning are decent, with a flashy, expensive look to them. Sadly, it's Gruffudd's Mr. Stretchy that lets the side down; his elongated body looks like nothing more than the CGI effect which it is. THE X-FILES underplayed it when Doug Hutchinson was cannibalistic serial killer Eugene Victor Tooms; any episode of that show is miles better than this trash.
Superhero films are usually noted for their large scale action set-pieces, and there's a halfway decent show-stopper here, as a fire engine threatens to crash off a massive bridge. Unfortunately that's the only good bit you're going to see. The ending is particularly weak, so much so that you'll have forgotten it a day after watching; I seem to remember somebody asking what happens to metal when it rapidly cools, but to be honest I was struggling to stay awake at that point. FANTASTIC FOUR is without a doubt the nadir of superhero films, and let us pray that they don't make another.