Cast
Ioan Gruffurd (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic)
Jessica Alba (Susan Storm/The Invisible Girl)
Chris Evans (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch)
Michael Chiklis (Benjamin Grimm/The Thing)
Julian McMahon (Victor von Doom/Dr. Doom)
Kerry Washington (Alicia Masters)

Non-fans of comic books and their legacy might not understand the staggering importance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s comic book The Fantastic Four. It revolutionized the medium when it first appeared in 1962. It turned Marvel Comics into the number one-selling comics publisher and ignited the Silver Age of superheroes. Costumed superheroes had largely gone underground during the 1950s, when the Comics Code Authority and Dr. Frederic Wertham’s witch-hunting book Seduction of the Innocent made be-tighted superheroics suspect with parents. Through most of the 1950s, comics instead turned to Westerns, romance, war, science fiction, and funny animals. In 1958, DC Comics made a move to restore the superhero with a re-tooled version of their Golden Age character The Flash, but the appearance of The Fantastic Four in 1962 truly brought superheroics back to the comic pages. Not only did it restore the heroes, it re-imagined them for a new age. Lee and Kirby made heroes of the likes no one had seen before: a dysfunctional family who didn‘t have secret identities (and for the first two issues, didn’t even wear costumes), and who bickered convincingly with each other while saving the world through a combination of astonishing super-feats and scientific wizardry.

The characters went to readers’ hearts, not only for their powers, but for their human foibles: Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic, a scientific wizard and kind soul whose obsessive love of his field often blinded him to everything and everyone around him. Susan Storm, a.k.a. The Invisible Girl, the mother figure of the team whose maternal strength kept them together even in the worst circumstances. Johnny Storm, a.k.a. The Human Torch, Sue’s teenage kid brother with a hot-headed temper and brash thrill-seeker attitude to match his incendiary powers. Benjamin J. Grimm, a.k.a. The Thing, Reed’s rough-and-tumble but dedicated best friend who finds himself receiving the curse of physical hideousness along with his powers of strength and invulnerability. Finally, the Fantastic Four had their eternal nemesis, one of the great villains of comicdom: Victor von Doom, an Eastern European scientific genius and former classmate of Reed Richards. His obsession with saving his mother from the netherworld and his desire for power led him to experiments that permanently scarred his entire body. Encased in metal armor, conquering his home country of Latveria, the newly christened “Dr. Doom” set out to put the world under the control of the only person he knew could rule it: himself. But since he blames Reed Richards for the accident that scarred him, he has to kill off all of the Fantastic Four first (priorities, priorities).

Such classic material deserves the big screen treatment, but the FF has had a slow and winding way to movie theaters. After deacdes of planning, and a low-budget film in the 1990s which was shelved, the comic book still dubbed “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” finally got greenlit for the silver screen…

…and somebody decided it would be a good idea to have the director of Barbershop and Taxi direct it.

Forty-three years of waiting, and they fumble the ball right in the end zone. And in front of a crowd pumped up from the genius of Batman Begins. How completely embarrassing.

The new Fantastic Four is not quite as awful as you may have heard from some of the critics. But so much promise rested on this franchise, so much time was spent on getting to this point, that the feeling of disappointment for most fans will be acutely painful. Average filmgoers might get a few thrills and chuckles from the antics, their kids might think parts are “cool,” but they will forget about the whole affair only minutes out of the theater. The Fantastic Four deserve better than that. They deserve something… well… fantastic.

The script from action film veterans Michael France and Mark Frost makes motions toward the comic book, updating it for the modern age in the mode of Marvel’s Ultimate Fantastic Four, but they substantially rewrite many of the characters into unrecognizable and poorly thought-out versions. The writers have a flair for one-liners for The Thing and The Human Torch, but they mishandle most of the character dynamics. They also haven’t crafted anything like a compelling story to go along with the characters. The two-hour movie has only enough plot to fill a half hour television show. The four heroes hitch a ride on powerful conglomerate Victor von Doom’s space station so they can observe a cosmic storm. After an abrupt accident on the station gives them their powers of elasticity, invisibility, strength, and pyrotechnics, the “heroes” sit on their butts in Reed’s skyscraper lab and argue about their powers for the rest of the movie. Reed and Susan share some love-patter, Johnny moans about how much he wants to show off, and Ben keeps accidentally breaking things. Meanwhile, Dr. Doom slowly (very slowly) starts to piece together some kind of plan that involves killing the newly christened “Fantastic Four” for reasons the movie never really confronts. He’s the villain; he’s supposed to do things like that.

Fortunately, both Ioan Gruffurd and Michael Chiklis do good jobs in their roles as Reed and Ben, the only characters that the script seems to understand. Gufford and Chiklis act like fans who have read the comic books for years and know exactly what makes Reed Richards and Benjamin Grimm tick. Scenes such as Ben unsuccessfully trying to pick up his ex-fiancée’s ring with his thick, mutated fingers, or simply trying to drink from a coffee cup without smashing it, contain the only genuine pathos in the film. The conflict between Reed and Ben, a clash of guilt and anger, feels like it comes straight from the comic books. If only the rest of the movie showed such understanding of what made the original magazine a breakthrough and a popular title even today.

Two of the other three leads suffer from off-base writing and poor performances. And the third is a monumental casting and writing fiasco, a bungle so huge that it would sink the film even if everything else worked.

I don’t need to spend much time on Jessica Alba or Chris Evans. They both deliver flat and generic performances: a hot chick scientist (who gets naked at the drop of a hat, even though she’s invisible) and an X-treme sports nut. Susan Storm’s motherly quality vanishes under Alba’s vapid acting, and Evans is far too old to play Johnny. The tempermental teen now struts about as a commercial for various ski and motorcycle companies, who assuredly put up a bit of cash to see their products displayed. The dynamic between older sister and kid brother has simply been written right out of the script, which leaves Sue Storm nothing to do but moon over Reed and wish he would pay more attention to her.

But Julian McMahon as Dr. Doom…I can‘t lay into this man enough. He wrecks the movie. Misconceived from his first line, and played with maximum boredom, Dr. Doom transforms from one of the great meglomaniacal comic villains of all time into a peeved CEO with some electrical powers and super-strength. Yawn. I can’t understand why the screenwriters decided to re-write the Latverian tyrant and power-mad scientist into an industrialist in the mode of Lex Luthor. McMahon’s non-performance makes the mistake worse: his demeanor never seems to change, and even when he puts on the Dr. Doom mask (an accurate representation, even though its existence is flimsily explained) he does nothing new with his voice, leading to the hysterical sight of a man strutting around in armor, cape, and metal mask speaking like an apathetic high school English teacher. Picture an average Joe from the office who managed to get himself one nifty costume for the company Halloween party: that’s Dr. Doom. The script drops in a few references to Victor von Doom’s home country of Latveria, as if to make fans happy just by its inclusion, but Victor’s foreign background otherwise means nothing.

Hobbled with these casting mishaps, a director like Tim Story hasn’t the chance of a snowball in the vicinity of the Human Torch of getting the film to work. Why the studio entrusted a potential blockbuster franchise and a legendary comic book property to the director of one mildly successful little comedy (Barbershop) is a scientific mystery that I doubt the combined brilliance of Reed Richard and Victor von Doom could unravel. Tim Story has no sense of straight drama and has no idea how to handle the superheroic action. Perhaps this explains why the heroics seem incredibly low-key. The film has a few moments of excitement, but it all builds up to a confrontation between the FF and Dr. Doom that concludes so quickly and unimpressively that when the words “The End” pop up, you’ll hope it’s a joke and the movie still has a real finale to show you.

Even on the technical level, Fantastic Four underperforms. The visuals effects look flat and unimaginative. John Ottman whips up some excitement with his musical score with a excellent theme for the team, but horrendous pop songs hammered in for no excuse at all will remind viewers that the movie isn’t looking to fashion a legend like the astonishing Batman Begins. Nope, this flick just wants to lighten your wallet quickly before you realize what a slacker effort it really is.

Such a shame, such a waste. Dr. Doom never could beat the Fantastic Four, but Hollywood laziness appears to have finally brought them down.

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