Superhero movie gone bad

Rating: 4/10 (31 January 2006)

The Fantastic Four is the latest in a long line-up of recent superhero movies. These flicks were pretty much all over the scale; from the excellent Spiderman's, Hellboy and The Incredibles to the mediocre X-men to the pretty bad Daredevils of this world. Unfortunately, The Fantastic Four does not live up to it's pedigree.
The entire movie feels rushed, and with a playing time just over 90 minutes, it probably was. The story, unabashed, takes major leaps and bounds, effectively eliminating the tension-arch. A pretty clear example was the cosmic storm that was suddenly rushed in. Along these lines were many of the character-developments; Ben, after being transformed back to normal, jumps right in the cosmic-storm-simulator again to be transformed back to The Thing to save Reid. This was pretty unbelievable after several occasions where Ben clearly states he hates himself as The Thing, and blames Reid for not doing enough to cure him.
Some people have commented that these kind of shortcuts are taken because of the cartoony/comic book nature of the movie. I, however, beg to differ. Spiderman I and II showed that good and believable character development is no problem for a superhero(movie). It must be said that The Fantastic Four had to deal with 5 major characters and the movie would have probably benefited greatly from an extra half hour. At the end of the day the movie kept me glued to my seat, mainly to see how this movie was cramping' Stan Lee's style.
As far as superhero-movies go, there are much better out there.