Von Doomed from the start

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2005)

Back in the 80s, when I was just a wee tot, I loved Marvel comic books. In my rotating spindle of Marvel favorites was Fantastic Four. Although the characters had stupid names (like most Marvel characters) and rather obvious personality traits, I frequently enjoyed reading about the fab foursomes' big adventures. Today, almost twenty years later, I found myself wading through the previews to see my old favorites take a stab at the silver screen.
The movie starts out pretty much the way it had to: scientist seeks information; scientist goes into outer space to find it; scientist gets roasted by cosmic, er, rays; scientist acquires cool new powers. The scientist is Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), and he brings along Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), her brash brother Johnny (Chris Evans), Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), and the inimitable Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon). Also along for the ride are Jessica Alba's boobsbut more on them laterand then a few more times after that.
Once the group arrives back from their cosmic ray encounter, they all soon develop their new powers. Reed can stretch his body to pick up falling glassware, Johnny can light himself on fire and brag about it, Ben is permanently transformed into a large rock (with matching rock organs), Sue can show her boobs at super-human frame-rates, and Vic Doom can become the worst, most uninspired actor our generation has ever seen. In fact, Julian McMahon's performance alone is bad enough to significantly lower the rating of this movie. After his investors pull out on him due to the botched space mission and Reed starts giving Susie (Doom's sought-after tail) the old elastic stallion, Doom becomes angry. To show how angry he is, he begins killing anyone he comes in contact with, including his exshareholders, his doctor, and even his doorman, by siphoning the power of metal and turning it into electrical kill waves...or something. Deviating from the comic book, Doom finds himself literally turning into metal and does what anyone would do in that situation: forge a metal mask to put over his already galvanizing face? That would be like a vampire buying a pair of fake vampire teeth to wear over his real vampire teeth.
Meanwhile, Ben Grimm is depressed because his girlfriend Debbie (Laurie Holden) finds him hideous and terrifying yet battles her way (somehow) through a mob of police, fireman, and countless burning vehicles to give her exstud back his engagement ring. If she was so repulsed and terrified of the newly transformed Grimm, why wouldn't she just mail the ring back to him? And why did she look so angry when overdramatically placing the ring on the ground? It's not like Grimm turned into a big rock in order to ruffle her feathers; in your face, future! Grimm eventually finds solace in Alicia Masters, a hot blind chick (right) who falls for his craggy exterior.
Johnny Storm is young, brazen, and driven for fame and fortune. Evans does a good job with the character and uses his energy and chiseled physique to squeeze out a few laughs and gasps throughout the movie. More impressive than Evan's portrayal of Johnny Storm was his chemistry with Chiklis. If he wasn't playing some amusing practical joke on the big lug, he was finding some other way to harass his mammoth buddy. Unfortunately for the rest of the movie, that's where the chemistry stops.
Reed and Sue were one of Marvel's alltime couples, two people madly in love with each other. Sadly, Alba and Gruffudd show all the chemistry of chunky peanutbutter and rotting salmon. In her pursuit to get Reed to notice her breasts, she comes off as cloying and clingy throughout the entire movie. Gruffudd's conservative motivation to portray Reed Richards as a nerd more focused on his books than on Sue's torso comes off as far too understated and caused my attentionspan to shrivel like a tulip in a steamroom.
In case you haven't heardit's trueJessica Alba has nice boobs, an attribute she's been directed to shove in our collective corneas every possible second of this film. "Sue, go invisible to get through the crowd!" orders Reed in the first of many action sequences. Off come Alba's blouse and pants. Conveniently for those in the audience obsessed with Alba's knockers, Sue hasn't yet gotten a firm grip on her big, juicy, voluptuous powers, so she tends to fade in and out of invisibility. Yes, there are her boobs againthis time in Lingerie! I didn't mind seeing the boobs once in a while (who wouldn't), but at a certain point, I felt that the director was using her tits as anchors for our drifting attention spans. Yes Tim Story, I'm talking to you. If you had more confidence in your own directorial skills, you wouldn't feel the compulsive need to tuck everyone inside of Alba's cleavage nook every 3.4 seconds.
Like most of these comic-to-movie translations, I think the Fantastic Four plot line could have been much darker. For every positive point Chiklis and Evans added to the movie, the rest of the cast more than took away. Victor Von Doom, in theory, made a good villainous choice for the film. It's just a damned shame that McMahon carried the role like a leper in a juggling contest. So, is this movie worth 106 minutes of your life? Maybe it is depending on how you look at it. The matinée show will cost you around six dollars. Some simple math tells us that runtime (106 minutes) divided by cost (six dollars) gives us 17.6666667, or the number of times we need to see Alba's breasts for this movie to be worth it. Though I didn't have the foresight to record the occurrences of her extremities, I'd bet that she hit that number easily. Yet, there's another way of looking at this simple quandary: the film is average at best and should simply be avoided.