My review - it's not bad, not great... and the other 10 star reviews on here are studio plants for sure!

Rating: 5/10 (4 July 2005)

Well, you weren't expecting greatness, were you? Regardless of what the wider public might be expecting from Fantastic Four, in internet circles it's been earmarked as the potential stinker amidst a promising summer since the first details leaked online. Unlike successful superhero franchises like X-Men and Spider-man, there's no respected director and no attempt to give the film a thematic depth or real world resonance. Where they had acting heavyweights, Fantastic Four has a couple of notable talents from successful TV series and a couple of almost-stars, with broad appeal but little charisma to bring to the mix. So the first question you might want answered is, "Is it awful?" Thankfully, no. Fantastic Four is simple, rather hollow, occasionally boring and then it's over. But it's hard to deny that, in places, it's also fairly entertaining.
The story, changed from the source, sees five ludicrously-named scientists venturing into space to investigate a large cloud of special effects that has something to do with DNA. The team manage to get all their character back-stories, exposition-based conversations and marriage proposals out of the way in good time, before turning their attention to some rather vital defence shields. Too late, guys. Now you've been hit by the marauding cloud and you're back on earth (there wasn't much budget, it seems, for showing the there-and-back trips... space is but a quick cut away).
The characters quickly discover their powers - team leader Reed Richards can stretch his limbs at will, Sue Storm can disappear and fire force fields, Johnny Storm can burn himself alive and whizz about the skies, and Ben Grimm turns to stone and breaks stuff. Cool? Nearly. There's an rather archaic nature to these superpowers - childhood dreams from a long gone era - but the film neatly modernises them by distracting us with some extreme sports. The kids might love it, but they're really only notable as the one place director Tim Story uses slow motion in the entire film. Rather proud, were we, of what looks like the only real stunt in the film not juiced up with CGI? And then there's the bad guy. Victor Von Doom was probably never born to do good, but now he's lost his money and his wife and turned into metal. So he's mightily annoyed, and while the world welcomes the Fantastic Four with open arms, he sets about doing some violence to people and eventually tries to take down the Four.
Pretty slim on plot there, and the only gaps are taken up by scenes of the guys coming to terms with their new powers. Strangely, their initial response to them makes you wonder if they've seen the trailer - there's no sense of surprise. They barely seem to care until they leave the lab and return to New York.
Johnny, with the flashiest abilities, is the only one to really embrace them, showing off and being rather endearing with it. The others are oh so desperate to get back to normal, which in the case of Reed and Sue seems rather stupid - they can do some cool stuff, but otherwise, pretty much live as normal Lucky them (although Reed, as the stretchy Mr Fantastic, could really do with the power to look convincingly attached to the rest of his body whenever he's stretching). The only character with real issues is Michael Chiklis' Grimm, clad in stone and called The Thing. Daily life becomes a problem for this rocky beast, but the film clamps him with a ludicrous subplot where his wife turns up at the scene of the gang's first act of heroism, and having seen her hubby save the lives of a fire engine full of FDNY guys, decides to hand back her wedding ring before even asking what's happened to the man she promised to love for ever. It's ludicrous, and makes The Thing's constant grump hard to connect with - sure, it might not be great to look like that, but met with her reaction, you'd expect him to develop a screw you attitude to the world and embrace his power for kicking holes in walls. A shame, really, because Chiklis' is the best performance in the movie by far, even as the film occasionally demeans the man who played Vic Mackey with bird crap jokes and suchlike.
The proceedings have a rather slapped together feel (characters appear in the right places by coincidence and fill in plot holes for themselves) until the action kicks in, and almost all of it is crammed into the closing ten minutes. Between the FDNY-saving bridge set-piece (in glorious daytime, showing the limitations of some rather dreadful FX work) and the nighttime city-streets showdown, there's little to get you particularly excited - just super-heroic shoe-gazing. That said, the finale is rather satisfying, with Johnny's flaming acrobatics delivering some of the highs of Spider-man's web-slinging antics across Manhattan. The team join forces to defeat the bad guy and it's home time.
Like X-Men, Fantastic Four feels rather like the setup for a sequel, now that the characters are in place. Sadly, where X-Men had a heart and a brain, Fantastic Four has some good-looking young actors showing plenty of flesh (although my highlight was Chiklis' wild forest of a bare chest, not Chris Evans' constantly-on-display gym-toned torso) and a bit of product placement where the emotional attachment should have been (Whopper, anyone?). At least X-Men's build up of characters made me want to know what happened to the mutants next. As for the Fantastic Four, pleasantly though they passed the time, I couldn't give care less about what the future holds for them.