Are These Reviewers Kidding?

Rating: 4/10 (20 February 2006)

I read the glowing reviews for this movie and I have to wonder: Are they kidding? The Fantastic Four is probably the worst of the recent major studio superhero films, greatly inferior to the new Spiderman, X-Men and Batman films. Maybe they are kidding, or maybe they are marketing drones trying to generate artificial word of mouth. Whatever the case, F4 is lame movie.
Although the cast ranges from tolerable (Chris Evans and Jessica Alba) to good (Michael Chilkis), and the FX are okay, the script is, in a word, bad. After the complex story lines and driven characters of recent comic book films, F4 comes off hasty and ill thought. At one point Ben Grimm, a.k.a. "The Thing" leaves a medical clinic high in the Rockies (it sure ain't in the Catskills) and walks, apparently overnight, to Brooklyn (where the audience must endure the line "this here's the only mook from Brooklyn what's gone into space.") Johnny Storm (a.k.a. "The human torch"), after an absurd extreme snow skiing slow-mo montage, is implied to have sexual relations with a gorgeous nurse, even though the same nurse an hour before measured his body temperature as being over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Wouldn't she, ah, have suffered some serious scalding?
It's the kind of film where any character can be comprehensively summed up with two words ("kindly egghead", "hotshot pilot" or "evil businessman").
Every super hero must oppose a super villain, and the quality of the villainy often determines the story's success or failure. Here in Fantastic Four we have Victor Von Doom, a handsome corporate leader who apparently has political ties to someplace called Latveria even though he went to MIT with Reed Richards and then hired Reed's sweetheart Sue when he became the head of Von Doom Industries which is so successful it has its own space station even though they can't float an IPO and Von Doom's grades weren't so hot. Since all the complexity went into Victor's insane back story, his character is wholly unburdened with it: He's the kind of character that's soap-opera handsome and drinks a cup of hot, steaming evil with breakfast. Villains like Ra's Al Gul or William Stryker do evil because they think they are doing good; Von Doom does evil because it's in the script.
The climactic action set-piece is a major disappointment, leading (of course) to the "it's over but not really over" ending demanded by a mediocre action film like this. The producers of Batman Begins, X-Men and Spiderman hired good writers and good directors before they undertook the mission of bringing beloved comic book heroes to the screen. The result is movies which are both thrilling and compelling, movies where you have something to think about when the action lulls. The mediocre directing and sub-par script of Fantastic Four proves the wisdom of that course. With this film we see the sad result of writers who don't respect the source, and don't bother to make a script worth filming.