Trailer:
"It's clobbering time!"
At long last we get a reboot of the Fantastic Four after the awful, low budget film back in 1994. Unfortunately this is nowhere near the film that we were hoping for. You see in most films there is supposed to be something called a plot. It is comprised of a series of events that form a story. Fantastic Four went into production before bothering to write one down.
Here is the “plot” for you. Five people head up into space to view a space cloud passing by earth. The project goes wrong and the five of them return to earth with all new powers. After that they proceed to sit in a tower for the next hour and fifteen minutes and b*tch about how sucky their life is. Finally we get around to a short a brief clash between a fantastic four and the mean and nasty fifth, the movie is done. Not much else in between besides a series of lackluster comedy and character shenanigans.
The casting actually isn’t that bad for three of the main characters. Ioan Guffudd as Mr. Fantastic does a good job and seems very true to his comic book counterpart in all aspects but one. Reed Richards is supposed to be one of the greatest scientific minds of all time but in the film he just f*cks everything up and never does one thing right. His attempts to heal his friends, evaluate the space cloud, none of the big things really work. Also his superpower to stretch like a rubber band looks unbelievably corny in the movie.
As with the original film the most sympathetic character is The Thing. He is probably the most interesting person in the movie, so much that you almost groan every time the camera leaves him. He truly is the one most effected as everyone fears him, he cannot interact very well with his environment, and his wife leaves him. You can’t help but feel a little bad for the guy. He has a good character arc as well.
Johnny Storm, played by Captain America (Chris Evans) does a reasonably decent job as more comic relief, but it’s definitely not Evan’s best performance. Many times he comes off as annoying and a lot of his character actions make me wish his friends shove him in a refrigerator, lock the door, and throw away the key. Bottom line, the guy is an idiot and not always a likable one.
The only one who gives an outright aweful performance is Jessica Alba as the Invisible Girl, Johnny Storms older sister. Not only does she fail to fit the roll of Susan Storm, but she reads her dialogue off so stale and wrecks and team chemistry that might have been. She acts like she couldn’t care less about the roll, but then again I have a hard time thinking of ANY good movies -Jessica Alba is in.
The villain of Dr. Doom is kind of reduced down from one of the greatest villains of all time to a metal Electro/ Green Goblin rip off. How is he a rip off of the Green Goblin? The fact he is a corrupt businessman about to be kicked out of his company by the board. He then proceeds to murder them. Sound familiar? It's because the Green Goblin did that only two years previously. He is just kind of a generic mustache twirling villain with a metal mask. His big plan is to murder the company board and kill the fantastic four so he can rule the world……somehow....for some reason.
I like to think that the Fantastic Four would stop him and be great heroes, but an unfortunate reality is that they are secretly the real villains of this film. No lie. They cause more unnecessary destruction in the first “action” scene than Dr. Doom does in the entire film. People treat them like heroes after they save some firefighters, but those idiot Fantastic Four are the ones who blew up the bridge in the first place. Also when the Human Torch is being chased by a rocket, instead of shooting a fireball behind him, he chooses to blow up an entire barge. These are without a doubt the most incompetent superheroes I have ever seen.
Really it is a good thing they pretty much sit in the tower for the entire film, otherwise they might accidentally burn down the entire city. They only come out for fifteen minutes to actually fight the bad guy, otherwise they are too busy fighting one another. Though admittedly the final fight scene is pretty cool.
In the end the Fantastic Four is a mediocre superhero film were character action doesn’t make sense and almost nothing happens in it. The only up side is that some of the characters are fun. Also it might not be good but it at least isn’t painful to watch and it’s a more child friendly superhero film that could entertain them for the afternoon. Otherwise save yourself the effort and just rewatch the Incredibles, which does everything this film tries to do but does it successfully.
FINAL RATING: 3/10- (30%)
Previous Day 55: The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl-
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/100superherodays/news/?a=57589
NOTE: polls used later in ranking so PLEASE VOTE if you have seen it!