A guilty pleasure, but only because of Chris Evans

Rating: 3/10 (14 September 2008)

I thought this was one of the worst comic book movies I've seen after a long string of passable to exceptional adaptations. It gets plenty of good reviews here so maybe I'm just missing something, but for me the appeal of the comic book movie isn't just in making you believe comic book characters could really exist, but that they could really exist in the same world as the rest of us. My problem with Fantastic Four is that there's enough cheesiness to break the illusion of reality. I never followed the comics, but if you only knew the characters from the movies, you'd think every fight was a carefully orchestrated scenario to make the Four use their powers together as a team. All told, the plot was weak, the characters weren't fleshed out very well, and the acting was pretty poor.
All that said, I do own a copy of it on DVD I bought used for five bucks, and the only reason I own it is for Chris Evans as Johnny Storm. He's the only actor who turns in a really good performance (even Julian McMahon, who I know to be a solid actor from his other work, didn't really impress me here, but I don't think he had very much to work with), his is the only character who comes off as someone you could find in the real world, and he's just too damn fun to watch. By himself he's not enough to save the film, but you get the feeling that if he ditched his teammates and got his own movie, it'd be a lot more fun than the hundred and six minutes sunk into watching this flick.
I like the serious comic book movies out there because they have a solid story to tell and they show people who aren't into comics that it is possible to use the medium to tell a solid story. At the end of the day, I just don't see Fantastic Four doing either of those things.