Very fun action movie you can watch with the kids

Rating: 8/10 (18 November 2006)

We bought this DVD because it's one of the few movies we enjoy watching with our 8- and 5-year old kids. Chris Evans as Johnny Storm and Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm are the best parts of this movie. Evans manages to be charmingly full of himself and an endearing trickster, constantly needling Chiklis's gentle giant. There is a lot of humor and action in a story about people coming to terms with superpowers. Those looking for a dark, complex, updated retelling will be disappointed. This is a live-action comic, not a graphic novel.
This movie suffered from being released after The Incredibles, the excellent Pixar parody of The Fantastic Four comic book. I think my boys prefer The Fantastic Four to The Incredibles because there is not a marriage or children in peril, both of which are scarier to them than men getting killed by Dr. Doom. The Fantastic Four was also unfavorably compared with Batman Begins, which came out the same year. While I really enjoyed Batman Begins, it is much darker and more of a brooding psychological journey, unsuitable for young children.
There is some gratuitous partial nudity in the film and about a half a dozen swear words which seem to be added to earn a PG-13 rating.