Fantastic Flop

Rating: 3/10 (17 October 2006)

I grew up with Marvel comics. At the time, back in the sixties, they were seen as a fresh alternative to the stale old DC mags that were Superman's venue. Marvel burst on the scene with the FF, Spider Man and the X men using truly superior artwork and story lines that gathered a big following. Maybe the people responsible for this nonsensical dud thought they could capture the same sense of wonder, or maybe they thought they could just make a quick buck, but this execrable offering does very little justice to the original comic books. It was easy enough going in to see the target audience - young people who watch a boatload of TV, who expect a lot of noise and are attracted to super heroes. But I suspect even they soon got tired of a super hero saga done on the cheap. Much of what went wrong with this forgettable flick is the way it hints at things but then never delivers, and when it tried to make good on it's premise it invariably fell on it's face. Enough of these insults and I, for one, truly grew to dislike the people I was watching. Seeming like a hybrid of tawdry soap opera, Sentai cartoons and Plan Nine From Outer Space, Fantastic Four tries to distract you from what it really is - just another cheap comic book adaptation.