Not so Fantastic

Rating: 3/10 (12 October 2006)

Fantastic Four: 4 out of 10 Some comic book heroes don't translate well to film. Daredevil was a case in point. While a blind guy wearing a cherry red leather outfit might work on the panels of a comic book it looks silly on screen. (Not that this excuses the horrible Daredevil movie mind you) Mr. Fantastic (The stretching guy) of the Fantastic Four suffers this same fate. When he stretches it looks either disgusting (hand squeezing under the crack beneath a door) or quite silly (every other time he stretches.) Not that the character is helped by Ioan Gruffud's somnolent performance. He makes up one third of the most sleep inducing love triangle ever filmed.
The lady in question is the Jessica Alba who looks fantastic in and out of her costume (She turns invisible when naked sorry guys. But some dutiful frame by frame DVD action will surprise the patient) but she expresses no emotion about either man (Or for that matter having superpowers. But I guess looking like Jessica Alba is kind of a superpower in itself). The third part is our pseudo villain Dr. Doom. (I say pseudo because he turns villain sometime around the closing credits in the most truncated villain performance in the history of superhero films) Dr. Doom as written for the comics is the perfect screen super villain. Which begs the question why he is barely in this movie and more importantly why he is a metrosexual evil businessman (Forced to be evil because his IPO went down in price and the bank is pulling out? Which shows a remarkable lack of knowledge how IPO's work) When Alba tells Gruffud she never slept with Doom we have to believe her. I have a hard time believing these saccharine characters go the bathroom let alone have sex.
The other two members of the four (Evans and Chiklis) give competent if one note performances. But by the time all the introductions and back-story is completed the movie is over. With no villain, unimaginative action set pieces and some shaky special effects Fantastic Four is more mediocre than fantastic. Though there is that one frame of a not quite invisible Alba that is Fantastic indeed.