Fantastic? I wouldn't go with that...

Rating: 3/10 (25 September 2005)

I am a huge fan of comic books based films, even though I haven't read the books. I enjoyed spiderman (not #2) and I loved both xmen. Based on the comments of other users in here, I decided to watch F4, because they were all saying it is fun. And that is all that matters in such films.
Well, it wasn't. First of all, I left with the impression that I watched a 50 minutes movie. It doesn't show that much. The first part actually shows nothing of interest. What you might have seen in trailers, well...that's pretty much it. There are no more action scenes, no fights between F4 and Doom. Actually, the only have one scene together, where they fight each other and then it's the end.
The CGI's are at least ridiculous.. The Thing came out nice, Jessica had the easiest part, I guess..but Mr. fantastic was, not even funny.. ridiculous. The first time I saw his hand stretching, I thought, OK, there is something wrong here. Not only it looks unreal, but if feels kind of silly, watching a grown up man stretching up the way he does. There is a scene where he has his palms in Thing's head. If you notice, you can see its pure cgi. And its pure slash bad cgi.
The acting is... and this is where this sentence could stop. Or rephrase, there is no acting. Mr. Fantastic is a bit annoying, he doesn't know what to do with his hands, his normal ones! Jessica is.. Jessica, and she does that pretty well, period. Johny came out nice, funny..but after a while he enters the 12 year old boy mode with his sister: "you know what, you're not mom". The Von Doom character was played quit decent by Julian McMahon... Overall, the casting was a big failure.
Other than that, the film features some nice shots of new york, building lights at night, some aerial shots. The music sounds cheap, the crashing cars elements are pretty nice, I especially liked the ones used in the bridge sequence.
I was very much disappointed by this movie. I wouldn't mind all of the above if it was fun, but it wasn't. I just hope for a much much better sequel, but if you have this as a first film, well.. you actually start from scratch.