Fantastic Four

There are countless minor problems with Fantastic Four that I could spend paragraphs discussing here. Characters lacking motivation, set-ups with no payoffs, awkward or clumsy segues into cheesy set pieces, long-winded and dull stretches of pointless exposition...Normally, I'd rip a film like this apart limb-from-limb, holding director Tim Story (of Barbershop and Taxi fame) and screenwriters Mark Frost and Michael France particularly responsible for the film's failure to entertain or satisfy.

But, let's face it...This mess isn't their fault. They all did exactly what was expected of them, and in some isolated cases, clearly have made the best of a bad situation. No, Fantastic Four is a failure of vision. Not an economic failure - the film was a hit at the box office, proving its investors wise from a budgetary standpoint. And not even a failure as a children's film...I suspect the under-12 set will enjoy The Thing and The Human Torch as characters and will like the colorful sets and outer space sequences.

But a failure of vision. A clear, cynical attempt to take a beloved, iconic, classic story from the realm of comic books and recycle its most famous catchphrases and visual images into a cheap, disposable summer entertainment. NO effort has been made here to preserve anything that might be unique, special or interesting about the characters and universe of Fantastic Four. This is not Spider-Man 2 or Batman Begins, where a filmmaker has taken comic book material and re-imagined it cinematically, focusing on remaining true to the central idea of the character and his surroundings while shifting between two completely different art forms. This is a mediocre summer kiddie flick that happens to start an orange rock guy, a woman who can disappear and an evil guy in a metal mask.



It's a shame, really, because the Fantastic Four story could have been adapted into a really large-scale, epic action-adventure film with arguably the best villain in any comic book movie. I think I've mentioned before on the blog how Victor Von Doom strikes me as perhaps the most fascinating arch-nemesis in all of comic books. The cruel leader of his own nation, a brilliant scientist whose own experiences left him scarred and disfigured, who further enhanced his misery by permanently covering his face in a metal mask, now obsessed with insidious plots of world conquest. I mean...that's good shit...

But like everything else here, the Good Doctor has been reduced in this film to a sneering, preening caricature. In a cast filled with TV actors and relative unknowns, Julian McMahon of "Nip/Tuck" gives easily the film's weakest, most soap opera-inspired performance. Doom is about as far from menacing as any villain in comic book movie history (including Ned Beatty's Otis from Superman).

The story does, to be fair, let McMahon down, abandoning his character completely in the Second Act before reintroducing him suddenly and setting him up in a lame, pointless showdown with the heroes. In many ways, the narrative in Fantastic Four mirrors Bryan Singer's failed first X-Men movie. There's a sense that the film is intended solely as an introduction to the world of the film - as an extended prologue - rather than as a complete story. Here, as well, we spend most of the film's running time meeting characters, watching experiments go horribly awry, and then getting a glimpse at what the sequels have in store.

Brilliant scientist Reed Richards is played by Ioan Gruffold, best known to TV fans as Horatio Hornblower, but also seen by me in films like Titanic, Black Hawk Down, Wilde and King Arthur. Yet I never recognize him from film to film. And not because he disappears into his characters, but because he is a bland anonymous presence. It's like Orlando Bloom in all his non-Lord of the Rings roles. You know you've seen him in other stuff, and he's supposed to be kind of famous and a movie star, but his total lack of charimsa makes him blend right into the background again and again.

Anyway, Reed is apparently on the outs in the scientific community for unknown reasons and with his former girlfriend Sue (Jessica Alba), also for unstated reasons. He pitches an elaborate research project to his old classmate, Captain of Industry Victor Von Doom (McMahon)...Richards' team will go into Von Doom's private space station to gather data about a mysterious energy cloud set to pass by the Earth.

And this is how Von Doom, Reed, his friend and assistant Ben Grimm (Michael "The Commish" Chiklis), Sue and her brother Johnny (Chris Evans) become mutated and fantastical. After the experiment goes awry, they all return to Earth and discover that they have wacky powers. Reed gets really bendy, Ben morphs into the monstrous rock-based Thing, Johnny can control fire, Sue can disappear and throw energy around...

And Victor kind of starts to turn metal and can conduct electricity and also move metal things around with his mind, kind of. And he seems to get really insane all of the sudden. And he develops an odd gash on his face. There's really no attempt to make Dr. Doom into a character here, honestly. I'm not even sure why they bothered. They could have come up with some other random villain for the first movie and brought Doom in for Fantastic Four 2.

Anyway, that stuff basically takes you through the entire first hour. The "we have powers!" discovery stuff is really overlong and jokey. There's even a comedy montage showing the characters using their powers in unconventional ways (like Reed - a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic - using his super-stretchy arms to get toilet paper from the closet while he's on the can! Hilarious!)

And did I mention the out-of-left-field snowboarding sequence, in which Johnny flees his hospital bed to magically hit the slopes via helicopter with his attractive young nurse? It's highly implausible! And features some of the worst pop-punk ever to grace a mainstream motion picture soundtrack! Johnny is clearly the character the ad wizards figured young males will like, so they've focused a lot of the worst product placement and dumb one liners around him. I believe his first three lines of dialogue in the film quote recent commercials (including a Mastercard commercial and a Burger King commercial), which does tend to date a film unneccesarily).

With more economy, I suspect this stuff could have been done in the first half-hour, leaving more time to develop the characters or introduce an action element to the story, but you'll recall my above thesis about this whole film...No one cared to make it a satsifying and complete story. It's a piece of marketing, shallow and broad by design, intended only to push the brand Fantastic Four on people, gear everyone up for a bigger-budgeted sequel and sell some DVD's and Thing dolls this holiday....um, I mean, blessed sacrimental manger-riddled Christmas season.

So what we're left with is a rushed 30 minute free-for-all in which Dr. Doom puts on his metal mask and decides to kill the Fantastic Four for no good reason. No. Good. Reason. He indicates that he might want to do something evil later, now that he can conduct electricity, and that he'll need Reed & Co. out of the way to do so, but this is extremely thin. Why not just do something really evil and see what happens?

But instead, he de-Things The Thing using Seth Brundle's teleportation pods from The Fly and then sets on the other three members individually to kill them, failing each time. It doesn't bode well for Dr. Doom. A the end of the film, there's one of those teasers that shows the villain escaping and preparing for another round of villainy, but it's not really scary because the guy has been so ineffectual thus far. All he set out to do in the world with his billions of dollars, his lust for power and his magical powers was to kill four people, and he couldn't even kill a single one! And one of them is Jessica freaking Alba (who between this and Sin City has proven quite a wily target for all manner of serial murderers this year).

Honestly, I feel kind of bad ripping the movie. As I said, Story and his writers clearly do the best with what they had. A quick scene in which New York "meets" the Fantastic Four when they save some firemen on the Brooklyn Bridge is well-executed and fun, and has that neat shot of The Thing stopping a big rig truck using his body that was in all of the commercials. (Never mind that the accident only happens in the first place because of The Thing...) And the final scene, in which a complete Fantastic Four battle Dr. Doom, is much more impressive and comic-like than, say, the speedy and muddy denouement of Singer's first X-Men movie.

What the X-Men sequel managed to do was take a dull opening film and really expand on its themes and ideas, to take the universe that was barely introduced in the first movie and make it more whole, fleshed-out and complete. It would be nice if Fantastic Four 2 could do the same, though I'm not sure if there's even any interest, considering how well this film performed.