With no high expectations you'll find -- while far from perfect -- F4 is still a fun movie

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2007)

Comic book movies have come a long way to being seen as serious action/adventure fare. The X-Men and Spider-Man series, as well as Batman Begins, helped to forge a seriousness in comic movies that has set a certain bar for achievement. However, The Fantastic Four seems to step back a bit to the more tongue-in-cheek method of crafting a comic book into a film. In doing so, it automatically handicapped its ability to create a realistic film, opting for a more fantasy based attitude. While the results aren't as disastrous as die-hard comic book movie fans suggest, they are not amazing either.
The story follows two scientists -- Reed Richards and Ben Grimm -- in need of funding for a project to observe an energy cloud approaching Earth which they feel could explain human evolution. They are forced to approach a wealthy industrialist named Victor Von Doom, who happens to employ Richards former girlfriend Sue Storm, to use his orbiting space station to monitor the effects of the cloud. The scientists along with Sue's brother Johnny to pilot their spacecraft arrive at the space station to find their initial estimates of the cloud's arrive time to be off and they are bombarded by the cloud's energies.
The five soon find themselves gaining strange abilities. Richards body becomes elasticized, giving him the ability to stretch to incredible lengths. Sue Storm finds herself with the ability to become invisible as well as create force fields. Johnny Storm gains the ability to burn at incredible temperatures and fly. Ben Grimm soon finds his entire body turned to rock. Von Doom finds himself slowly turning to an organic metal and gaining the ability to manipulate energy. Circumstances soon change finding Richards success taking off as Von Doom's company fails. This sets Von Doom off on a mission to turn the tables back in his favor.
With several great action sequences, excellent effects work and superb casting of some very strong talent (including the always dynamic Michael Chiklis), the film is certainly enjoyable from an aesthetic point of view. However, with a fairly shallow storyline and dialog that often is wooden and jagged, it falls short of its comic book film contemporaries. Those walking in with heightened expectations of greatness along the lines of Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2 will certainly be disappointed by the Fantastic Four's more juvenile approach. However, if one keeps in mind that it is more popcorn entertainment than Oscar worthy landmark, the Fantastic Four still manages to be an enjoyable action/science-fiction movie as a whole.
My rating: 6.8/10